Windows 7: Help repairing system after a coffee-related accident

Hi all,

I'll start by saying that I'm not a regular Windows user, so please go slow with me.

My wife spilt an entire cup of coffee onto her laptop today. She immediately pulled the battery and power but its going to take a few days to dry out properly and really assess the damage. In the meantime I've pulled the disk and put it into my kid's laptop - its an identical model.

When I boot, it gets part-way through the boot then hangs for a few moments before blue-screening. The blue screen only flashes briefly before the system goes back to POST. If I start in safe mode the hang occurs just after CLASSPNP.SYS is loaded.

I worked through the Startup Repair dialog. The first time it very quickly decided it wanted to go back to a restore point, so I let it. This did not fix the problem. The second time it worked for over half an hour before deciding it couldn't do anything to help.

I then tried the instructions listed here:

Startup Repair Infinite Loop Recovery

The sizes for DEFAULT was ~225Kb, SOFTWARE ~57Mb, SYSTEM ~13Mb. SAM and SECURITY were both 24576 which is an order of magnitude smaller, but at this point I figured I had very little left to lose so I tried it (I still have the backup of course).

This didn't help - it still blue-screens.

The critical thing at this point is to retain the data. It still appears intact when I look around with the recovery prompt, so I think its ok for now. I'd be quite happy to reinstall except that it will wipe the data to do so, and I've had little success copying the data using a USB enclosure to another system - it looks like there's a lot of file permissions in the way but I really don't know enough about Windows to change things with any confidence.

Is there any way to restore this system to some usable state?

Thanks,
Rob.

Check the hard drive with the manufacturer's diagnostic tools.
Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.
HD Diagnostic


If you have a External HD, you could copy & paste your data.
Copy & Paste - in Windows Recovery Console