Katrina Victim

[Dogtree]

Kinda sorta. My company had an office in New Orleans, but thankfully none of the equipment I'm in charge of was drenched (no one was hurt either, so I'm not being callous). I do have the issue of recovering it for use elsewhere though. My primary concern is disease. The CDC hasn't been helpful at all about how to clean up a computer so that it can be reused and if someone pulls out a fan, the whole office doesn't get some nasty disease.

Does anyone have any tips on cleaning up electronic hardware that's been sitting around a pool of stagnant, disease-ridden water for three weeks?

p.s. I got to wear a hazmat suit! How many IT pros can say that, eh? :D

[jwenting]

Dump it.
Send the harddisks to a data recovery company for spooling the data onto tapes or new disks and put those in new computers.

Even if you could clean the old ones, I'd not want to trust my business to them. Corrosion, electronics+water=shorts, etc. etc.

[kc0arf]

Hello,

Working in a IT department at a hospital, I got to wear surgical gear -- we called them Bunny suits, and as my shoes are too big for the foot things, I had to wear hairnets around my shoes.

I agree with jwenting that you should pull the drives and move the data to new ones. While you might be able to clean them up and work with them on your own, I also agree that the computer that has been sitting in grief and misery should just be let go -- it is not as if you could go out there and powerwash the motherboards. Well, you probably could do that, but introduce problems. I am wondering if the RAM would be recoverable though.

Good luck with all this.

Christian

[goldeagle2005]

You could try salvaging the mobo, lan and gfx cards as well. Just make sure you dry them thoroughly. Keep them under a gentle flow of warm(not hot) air for a while.

The hard drives and optical drives are another story though. I agree with the other guys that you ought to replace them.

Good Luck

[jwenting]

don't salvage those things! They might look nice and shiny after being disinfected and cleaned with a high pressure hose but would you trust them?
Electricity + water = BIG NONO.

[chrisranjana]

Hopefully things get normal soon.