Four days ago I was watching one
of Hutch's
Modern Warfare 2 videos on youtube. At some point I laughed and my
left hand took advantage of this temporary lapse by knocking over
the large glass of milk I had just poured for myself. It went right
on top of my Macbook Pro.
I don't have a picture of the immediate aftermath but there was
milk everywhere. I was happy to see my external hard-drive
was turned on which meant I had a Time Machine backup, so I quickly
shutdown the machine and tried to drain some of the liquid off.
At this point there seemed to be only one option. I couldn't let the
milk dry out because it would leave a thick coating on the logic
board and anything else it came into contact with. I couldn't wipe
down everything by hand because there was bound to be milk in places
I couldn't access.
I decided the best thing would be to pour an extra 2 glasses
of water on the laptop to flush all the milk out and
replace it with semi-clean water. I would much rather deal with
water than milk. So I poured over the water where the milk had been
spilt and held the laptop on its side to drain.
I now had a bit more time to Google for information using my
iPhone. A lot of sites tell you to wait for a few days so everything
can dry out, but I didn't like the idea of water sitting in there
for ages possibly corroding the components.
I found a guide on ifixit.com
that explained step-by-step how to strip down the machine, and I was
lucky enough to find this tiny Phillips-head screwdriver in the
toolbox which worked perfectly for most of the screws:
And just when I thought all was lost I found an item on my
Leatherman that could undo T6 Torx screws:
So I opened up the machine and went to work with the hair-dryer:
After a good 20 minutes of drying I put everything back together and
tried booting her up. I was happy to see the OS X desktop, but after
starting Safari I heard those horrible clunking death-sounds from the
hard-drive. So I opened her up again.
Yep, the hard-drive was drenched in milk. I didn't realize that the
milk had got that far, so I had been focusing the hair-dryer on the
logic board and I/O ports. I tried cleaning it but to no avail: on
the next boot attempt the drive only managed a pathetic whining
sound and the OS X boot manager showed me a big fat question mark.
So I ordered a new hard-drive from Amazon. The old one was a Seagate
Momentus 7200 RPM with 160 GB of storage. I ordered the same model
with 320GB instead.
One other problem I noticed when booting up was that I had somehow
managed to tip the laptop the wrong way when draining it: there were
liquid stains all over the inside of LCD... it was a
mess. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of this.
So I had a go at cleaning that up. Unfortunately on my first attempt
I partially stripped a Torx screw that I needed to undo to get
access to the display. I couldn't use the Leatherman anymore so I
had to wait for a mini-screwdriver set to arrive before I could
continue with a proper T6 Torx screwdriver:
Cleaning up the display was a bit of a disaster. Firstly, I damaged
the iSight connector:
Luckily I rarely use it.
Secondly, a mystery piece of magnetized metal fell out from
somewhere:
I ended up stuffing this into a little groove where it obviously
didn't belong. Does anybody know what this is for? (That's just a
little dot of blue ink you can see on it)
UPDATE: Turns out this is the sleep magnet, and sleep still works so it looks like I did put it back in the right location!
I did manage to clean up the LCD panels a bit:
Here you can see some of the milk/water:
However I didn't put it all back together again properly so there
are now a few artifacts on the screen:
And the display is not aligned properly so it's too far to the top
right which means it is now missing couple of rows and columns of
pixels:
The new hard-drive arrived today and I put that in with no
problems. Everything is working again now. I restored from a Time
Machine backup so the system is missing no more than 60 minutes of
data. I was only watching Youtube videos so I didn't lose anything.
All the I/O ports seem to be working, and the various temperature
and fan meters in iStat pro look normal.
So overall I think I came out of this pretty good. Apart from a few
screen artifacts and a broken iSight (both my fault) I'm back up and
running with hopefully no more issues to come.
I did have one more year of AppleCare left, but I recently had a new
logic board and RAM chips installed under that, so assuming there is
no damage from the spill they should be good to go for a few more
years.
Overall this was quite a fun experience, although there was a moment
of dread deep in the deconstruction of the LCD where I thought "Oh
god, this had better work when I put it back together". Time Machine
is a life saver, and ifixit.com
is a fantastic site.
So to summarize:
- Milk damaged the hard-drive. I put in a replacement with double
the capacity:
a Seagate
Momentus, 2.5in, 7200 RPM, 320GB
- Milk got behind the LCD. I cleaned this up but there are now a
few artifacts and the screen is not aligned properly.
- The iSight is no longer functioning because I damaged the
connector while opening the LCD.
- I now have a pretty nifty set of mini-screwdrivers: Hama Mini Screwdriver Kit