How to Recover Data from a Water Damaged Laptop
Summary: A laptop may get water damaged accidentally, which may lead to permanent data loss. Here are the measures and steps to safely handle and recover data from your water-damaged laptop using reliable, Stellar data recovery software.
Modern laptops are powerful portable computing machines that come equipped with advanced wireless capabilities, seamless connectivity options, faster memory, high functionality, and portability features.
But not a single laptop for home users is rated as water-resistant, let alone water-proof.

This means most laptops out there—except rugged notebooks and tough books such as Dell Latitude 7424—are prone to water damage.
A laptop may get water damaged accidentally due to spilling water or a cup of coffee, while working. This could be disastrous, especially if it happens to be your work laptop or occurs while you are working on an important document or project.
Water can damage the internal electronic components including the storage media, which could lead to permanent data loss.
While you can always buy a new laptop, you may not be able to recreate or recover data such as photos, videos, documents, emails, etc. lost when a drive gets damaged. But if you act quickly and know what to do if something like this happens, you could save your laptop from damage and avoid data from vanishing beyond recovery.
How to Handle and Recover Data from a Laptop Damaged by Water

A water-damaged laptop may or may not survive depending on how much water fell and seeped inside the motherboard and other critical components such as hard drive. Even if the water does not reach the critical components, it inevitably will lead to corrosion over a period.
Thus, it’s important to handle a water-damaged laptop carefully.
Follow these precautionary measures and steps to safely handle and recover data from your liquid-damaged laptop,
1. Turn off your laptop

Quickly turn the laptop upside down to prevent water from seeping inside the laptop. Also, switch off your laptop. Do it forcefully, if required, by holding the power off button.
2. Never Use a Hair Dryer

Strictly avoid using a hairdryer to evaporate the water. This can cause further damage by overheating critical laptop components. Besides, hot air evaporates the water, which may condense inside the laptop and reach other critical components to cause further damage.
3. Remove the Battery

Disconnect the battery. If the battery is internal, try disconnecting the battery connector. You may also take the help of a professional to dismantle laptop and disconnect internal battery.
4. Disconnect Storage Drive

After opening the laptop, quickly disconnect your hard drive or SSD to avoid any damage to the drive and potential data loss. Use a paper towel or microfiber cloth to soak in excess water and clean the storage drive.
If you see visible marks of water damage or doubt that some water may have seeped into the drive, insert the drive in a zip lock bag along with silica gel packet(s) for few hours. This will soak in the remaining moisture from the drive.

5. Inspect Drive and Back up Data
Use a SATA to USB Converter cable or enclosure to connect the drive to a different Windows PC or laptop for data back up and then follow these steps:
- Open Disk Management tool and File Explorer to check if the drive is recognized and accessible.

- If the drive is accessible and you can view data, the drive is probably safe. However, to ensure hard drive safety and avoid data loss, back up all your important files to a secure location such as an external disk or cloud storage. Then follow these steps to check critical SMART parameters and health status of the drive,
- Install and launch Stellar Data Recovery Professional software.
- Choose ‘Monitor Drive’ under ‘More Tools’ and select the connected drive from the drop-down at top-right.
- Inspect the hard drive health, check SMART Status, scan disk for bad sectors, and if required, clone disk to prevent data loss and retain Windows installation.

- If the drive isn’t accessible but visible under the ‘Disk Management’ tool as RAW volume, launch Stellar Data Recovery Professional software and choose ‘Recover Data.’
And follow these steps to recover files from the inaccessible and probably corrupt (RAW) hard drive,
IMPORTANT NOTE: In case, the drive isn’t recognized or visible when connected to the PC, you should immediately reach out to a professional data recovery service expert such as Stellar®.
Equipped with state of the art Class 100 Clean Room Lab, Stellar® guarantees up to 100% data recovery from water damaged laptops and hard drives with complete data privacy. You can reach out to the experts 24*6 via direct call, chat, or email.
Final Words
Recovery of data from a water damaged laptop is possible and feasible, but only if you act quickly and know what to do in such a situation.
For most users, data is more important than the laptop. Learn and follow the precautionary measures and steps discussed in this post to safely get back data from a water-damaged laptop.
And to avoid data loss, maintain a regular back up of all your critical files and documents on an external media, cloud storage, or both.
Also, keep a handy software tool such as Stellar Data Recovery Professional that works as an ‘instant-back up’ utility and helps you retrieve lost and inaccessible data from all kinds of Windows laptops, desktops, and supported storage media devices. However, in case of business-critical data or severe water damage, it’s always wise to reach out to a reliable data recovery service expert like Stellar® and avoid permanent data loss.
The support provided along with the commercial software is really helpful. The guys really helps a lot. Cheers
We are really proud of our high expertise support team. Thanks for the motivation.
l was working on my dissertation which l had saved on a desktop folder. l accidentally spilled hot water on my laptop & now l can’t start it / log in. ls there any chance l can recover the files l had saved on the desktop?
Dissertation is due today. Very stressed & don’t know what to do. Please help.
As per the case we suggest you to extract the drive from the laptop and try connecting it to any other system. Kindly check whether the drive is getting detected and gets mounted on the system.
If in case the drive is not getting detected we strongly suggest availing the data recovery services for the failing hard drive.
Please let us know.
Hey Amelia,
Thanks for reading our blog!
Truly impressed with your tips and trick to save our data, after water damage on Acer laptops.
It’s really a very informative post. Appreciate the preventive measures mentioned in the post.
Hello Amanda,
Thanks for your positive words.
You can read our other post also, you will surely enjoy them also.
Regards
Team Stellar Data Recovery
Please assist me from where to buy Stellar Data Recovery Software. If possible, please share the link.
Hello Andrew,
I suggest purchasing the software from the official website.
Please use this link – https://www.stellarinfo.com/disk-recovery/WDR-PRO/buy-now-pro.php
Hello Sir,
Really urgent. The software not able to recover data from hard disk. What to do next. I checked all the cables and ports. Please suggest.
Hello Jay,
Please try to make an image of the hard drive and then try to recover data from imaged drive.
Good Luck.
It is good to know that Stellar software can even recover data from water damaged laptop. Another feather in the cap.
Hi Marque,
You can try our software, in the case of any data loss/deletion situation.
Nice Article! The preventive points if follow timely can save the life of our laptop and lots of our hard earned money too. I want to thank the author who collected all the points and penned down in the single post. Alternatively using Stellar data recovery software is a nice option.
Our laptop machine is a very sensitive device in terms of Water spilling. If water spills on our laptop, it may results it into damage. Sometimes, it will lead to a data loss also. So, the best practice to avoid this situation is always to be ready with a backup.
Spilling of water on a laptop is a very panic situation. This will bring up to lose our pocket for data recovery and will make us reach to a data recovery service Centre. I had recently faced this situation, and that’s why I would like to recommend my friends that kindly take a backup always on a regular interval of time to avoid such annoying situations. Thanks for the post.
What a nice post. The general preventive measures points are really informative, which can saves life of data and laptop/PC. The points if done properly and timely, reduce the chances of failure of data and PC machine.