Help! Water on my motherboard.

[Probe]

I had a small incident where my place flooded in and water reached the lower section of 2 of my motherboards when fixed on tower casings, the PCs were both turned off when this happened and I quickly moved them to higher ground. I have since then evaporated the water using a hair dryer and a high speed blower and set the motherboards out to dry for 2 days. I pluged them in yesterday and both boards don't seem to start up.

Does this mean that they are both damaged? Would I have done the damage when I plugged them in and powered up yesterday? Should I have waited for a longer period of time before powering them up? Is there any chance of getting them to work if I let them dry out some more?

I was using these 2 boards on 2 Video editing systems.

1) Gigabyte 8INXP - (i7205)
I was using the onboard Promise IDE RAID in standard ATA mode to have four 120GB Maxtor HHDs run a software RAID through disk stripe in Windows 2000 Disk Administrator. Is there any way I can retrieve the data?

2) ASUS P5WD2 Premium - (i955X)
Was using the onboard Intel SATA RAID in ATA mode to run a 2 drive software RAID in Windows XP. Any Idea how this data can be retrieved?

Any suggestions on how to get these boards working if possible would be appreciated. If the boards are dead how would I go about getting the data on the software RAID? I was thinking if in a worst case scenario to replace the boards with identical boards, this is possible for the ASUS P5WD2 Premium as it is available for sale, but the Gigabyte 8INXP is not longer available and I can't seem to find one for sale anywhere yet. Please help.

Thanks

 

[RichPLS]

Clean water should not hurt mobo if not connected to power.
Should let dry a few days tho, preferably a week, and should for fine.
If powered up before dry could fry compenents, maybe not is somewhat dry and power turned off quickly.
Wait and see is all I can say.

 

[Probe]

Yes, I think I should have waited more than 48 hours... but I had dried the motherboard with a hair dryer and left out for 2 days. I figured it was dry enough, I will wait a while longer and try it again.

Any idea on the best option to get the data on the saftware RAID? I figured the best way would be to get the identical motherboards again. But I am having difficulty in locating a GA-8INXP... anybody know where I can find one for sale?

 

[RichPLS]

http://www.dealtime.co.uk/xPP-motherboards--intel_e7205


http://www.misco.co.uk/productinformation/~48137~/product.htm?affiliate=2004

 

[Probe]

Thanks... they ship to the UK only, I'll have to get a friend to get it and deliver to me.

 

[pat]

Any other board with the Promise controller should do. I did move an array thru an old Promise controller on my Soyo Dragon+ (kt266 chipset, years 2001) to a newer Soltek nforce2 with Promise 376. Then from the Soltek nforce2 to a Soltek nforce3 with a promise 576 comtroller..

Even a Promise PCI card should do. So, if you want to upgrade to newer board, this card should give you your data back.

 

[pat]

the PCs were both turned off when this happened

Turned off don't mean powered off. There is still some standby current that remain on the motherboard even if the computer is turned off. I killed one video card one time when a small screw fell of my finger right on the video card .. While the computer was turned off, the power cord was still plugged..

The computer turned on by itself but no video anymore... Happily, my motherboard did not suffer any damage..but the video card was dead.

So, it is probably what killed the board. Contaminated water might have cause some short on powered area on the motherboard which kill it..[/quote]