21 Jul
2005
21 Jul
'05
5 p.m.
On 7/21/05, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Actually, I think you may be pleasantly suprised.
Water does little
damage to computer hardware if it's not powered up at the time.
_Clean_ water does little damage to unpowered systems.
I lost a Diablo 30 drive a number of years ago when it was being
stored in the basement of my mother's shop along with a bunch of
equipment in active use (11/23, LA180, RL01, RL02...) when the sewer
line from the building to the alley was plugged (by flushed feminine
products from the beauty salon next door) and first rainwater, then
raw sewage backed up into the basement to a depth of about a foot.
It took the building owner days to get things fixed and drained,
during which time all the books on the bottom bookshelves had expanded
and burst the shelves, lower boxes glued themselves to the floor, and
internal parts of diablo drive had begun to rust. I did rescue the
overwhelming majority of things from that basement - well over 90%.
The insides of the diablo, though, were pretty nasty. Fortunately,
the lower 2' of the H960 was empty, not even a power sequencer box to
short out. None of the PDP-11 or PDP-8 stuff got so much as damp
(lost a full box of greenbar paper, though).
I'm not saying don't try to clean and recover stuff, but after a
seeing a couple of comments about how safe water is, I wanted to
remind people that flood water is rarely just water... it usually
brings contaminants in with it, but if you are lucky, it's only a
light organic residue. It's probably a lot more work than you might
imagine, if you haven't done it already.
As for how to proceed, I find Tony's comments entirely appropriate -
isopropanol (as it's called in the US) is quite useful as a solvent
and drying agent (because alcohol and water are soluable in each
other, and the alcohol is more volatile) - get the good stuff (97%?
98%?), not 70% "rubbing alcohol", unless you are going to follow up
70% isopropanol with 98% propanol. I'd be more worried about stuff
with relays than stuff with ICs, but IC pins can and will rust, and
water does get down in sockets - don't forget to clean those.
Good luck with cleanup.
-ethan