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OK, friends, I have a hard drive question (not specifically about Ubuntu):

So, I accidentally spilled water all over the keyboard of my Dell Latitude D610 laptop--and then it would only sometimes detect the hard drive, and when it did detect it, it would crash after a few minutes.

So, I ordered a new hard drive and installed it, thinking it would solve the problem, but come to find out, it brought the same error:

"HDD Error: No boot device detected. Press F1 to try again, or F2 to enter setup."

I looked in the BIOS to see if it said that it was detected, and it wasn't. So, does anyone have any advice on getting this to work? Are the hard drive readers fried?

Oh, and I attempted to boot from an Ubuntu Live CD, which I have previously done successfully on this same laptop, but now it boots to the desktop background, and then sits there - nothing about installing Ubuntu or trying it out or anything come up.

Then, after a while, the screen goes black. Any advice for this, please? Thanks!

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  • Sounds like you need new hardware - It sounds like the graphics and hard drive readers (or something between the hard drive and the rest of it) have gone. It may be best to turn it off, remove the battery, (and possibly the new drive, if it has not been fried), and take it somewhere to get it looked at/fixed.
    – Wilf
    Jan 30, 2014 at 23:06

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Liquid spills produce various symptoms and issues depending on which components have been damaged. There is not much you can do on a software level since it's a hardware problem. you MAY still be able to get files out of it by connecting the hard drive to another machine, but fixing this laptop may not be cost-effective.. again, depending on which components have been damaged.. I fix laptops at work and liquid spills often kill the system, even though it appear to be partially working right now.. In some cases you can take it apart , clean out the components, dry it out, replace some cheap parts (keyboard, HD) and make it work again, but there is no guarantees since liquid damage can produce additional issues even two months after the fact.. I've seen a lot of that happen before. Good luck!

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  • OK, thank you. I'll check around and see what I can do.
    – Holden
    Jan 31, 2014 at 11:54

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