Computer salvage Question.

We in southwestern PA got hit with a sort of perfect storm situation over here (Ivan hit a cold front above us and dropped 6 inches in 8 hours) The office my wife works at got hit with a torrent and she JUST made it out in time. Long story short, I have 6 computers in my basement that spent about 8 hours under 7 feet of water.

Is there ANYTHING worth saving here? 3 of them were on at the time, so I sort of assume they are completely fried, right? Could the others have usable parts? (CPU, memory?)

Also, are the cases okay? Specifically the wiring to the front panels? I KNOW the power supplies are history.

It'd be a miracle if I could salvage the hard drive info, they were never good at backing up data...



[Edited on 9/21/2004 by soulforge]

If the computers were on....0% chance of salvaging.
If the computers were off....10% at MOST.

Iv seen somebody salvage information from flooded computers before...but he had to send the drives into DriveSavers.

The cases themselves should be fine. The computers that were on are probably no worse off than those that werent, as I suspect the power was gone by the time the water was high enough for them to be under anyway.

Never know your luck in a big city, strip them all right back (turf power supplies) let them dry right out, give a good clean with metho and see what you have left. I've seen a laptop take a bottle of water through the keyboard and fight back, as well as failing to kill a few mobile phones after swimming with them, so anythings possible. Most of the internals are sealed up nice and tight as their own units, corrosion on the exposed terminals will be the pain though methinks.

Well, I think the cases may be fine once I wash them. The Athlon 1.3 is fine, it seems. I could not get the Duron to post, but it may merely be that I was using a Kt133 board that did not recognize it. All the SDRAM seems fine. I could not test the DDR Ram, but I may get up the courage to test it in my home system some day. The Hard Drive LITERALLY have water still in them(You can hear it when you shake them), so they are dead, as are the mobos, CD-roms, and netowrk and lan cards. as a surprise, two agp card, a radeon 7000,and a rage II card, seem to work fine.

I must admit that it was a mess. Some of the computer were quite dirty before the were drenched, and the mud dried like cement on much of the components.

But, the video cards, ram and cpus alone may save the company about $150, and we are considering sending the most important hard drive to one of those data recovery services.

Moral of the story....Off-site storage and weekly data backup!

Originally posted by soulforge
Moral of the story....Off-site storage and weekly data backup!

And never store them at lowest parts of house.

This was actually a unique storm, once in a hundred, 200 years. And it was in an office warehouse. Everything is pretty much toast, as far as the office is concerned. As much as $10,000 in damage, not even counting the loss of information on the hard drives...