Dang...my friend spilled coke on his laptop!

It's a HP laptop computer with Vista...it powers up and then gives following message: "No bootable deivce found. Insert disc." He says he has no disc. Doesn't know what to do. Perhaps he can do nothing. The computer's shot! He would greatly appreciate your assistance.

Thanks,
Dennis

Oh.. That might be a bad idea, but this is what I would do:

Pull out the battery.
Open the computer and dry it off.
Then place it where excess fluids may come off.
And cross your fingers the Coke didn't bust any of the internal components.. If you aren't tech savvy or like you know what your doing, I wouldn't suggest opening up a Laptop..

Depending on how much coke he spilled ( I am assuming you mean coca cola ) He may have damaged the motherboard. Its best to let it dry out and see if it works after the liquid dries. There will be some residual stickiness From the sugar hopefully its not irreparably damaged. The "No bootable" disc inserted means the laptop is not finding the HDD and its looking for other options to boot from. Wait for it to dry and try again.

edit: and yes as above remove the battery and unplug it.

Edited by Sneakycyber, 25 February 2009 - 08:25 PM.

All electronical devices work somewhat the same in operation wise (like Cellphones when they get dipped in water, or when you drop your iPod in the toilet...)

You might want to remove the keyboard & see if any liquid got under it.
The same thing happened to a driend of mine.
He kept trying to start the unit until it just fried out.

If there is liquid under the keyboard it needs to be disassembled & cleaned.

While you have the KB off rinse it down with DISTILLED water.

Distilled water is not conductive [no minerals] & can be used to rinse components to get the sticky off as long as you let them dry well before using/reassembling.

Edited by fairjoeblue, 25 February 2009 - 08:59 PM.

I thank all of you for your kind advice. I will pass it along and see what develops. I may be back.

Thanks again,
Dennis

I had this problem years ago with a little TV and a can of Coke. Luckily my Dad (an engineer for RCA at the time) explained it to me.

The liquid gets on the circuit board and provides a short circuit
The electricity in the circuit board travels across this short circuit.
As it travels it "carbonizes" (Dad's words, not mine) the path across the circuit board that the short circuit takes.
When dry, this carbon remains and keeps the short circuit intact.

To demonstrate, he scraped the area between the traces with a pocket knife (this was an OLD circuit board) and the TV started working again!
Newer circuit board traces are too close together (and multilayered) - so don't try this on yours!