Some information may have been deleted from BIOS

[Jugert]

Hi guys, I have a problem with my HP laptop. Three days ago my sister accidentally spilled beer on the keyboard. The amount of beer was as much as a regular spoon.

After she spilled it, she immediately turned it upside down and she was shaking it without turning it off first so the laptop turned off on its own.

She took a hair blower and she was trying to dry the beer on the keyboard. The battery wasn't removed as well... When I got to know the incident I took the laptop and removed the battery immediately.

Because I didn't know much what to do on beer, i searched online and I saw that to deal with this problem, I had to clean any beer liquid which still was on the laptop. I opened the case and I could see that the beer penetrated inside of the laptop and touched the board.

My family insisted me to try to power on the computer to see what happened which I highly disagreed. Though I plugged the laptop and it wasn't turning on. I unplugged it immediately but forgot to remove the battery.

I searched again on what to do on any beer spilled case and while I was seeing the web, I noticed that the laptop turned himself on while on battery attached and the fact that I didn't have much battery left, it turned off. It made this several times until I removed the battery.

As website recommendation I left it untouched for 24+ and I noticed I had some progress. The laptop can turn on but there is another problem. As discussed at this link [https://superuser.com/questions/1533216/serial-number-missing-from-board?noredirect=1#comment2325934...] which was officially opened by me, a user says that the beer could have made a short circuit causing the EEPROM or BIOS on my laptop, to delete some information such as SKU Number, Product ID and some more. As I said before the laptop can be turned on but it says me that some information are missing or wrongly entered and there is another option to press enter to continue startup.

I enter and it redirect me to Boot Express Options which has a countdown starting at 150 second if I'm not wrong. I wait it to finish because if I press anything it will freeze. After the it finishes it proceeds me at boot loader to select any OS since I'm dual boot, Ubuntu and Windows.

After booting to Ubuntu I realized that the "wifi" wasn't anymore there like it should have been and after running some commands in hope to see the product id or sku family, it retrieved me just BLANK. Then i know that the problem could really be the BIOS. So I restarted and booted to BIOS this time.

I booted to it because I wanted to reset it at factory settings and when I did it, my screen turned black and didn't restart as I was hoping. I did it because I thought it would bring the info back. Now I got the "black screen on startup" symptom which I followed a guide on the HP support page and hopefully it worked.

The thing is that it takes WAY longer than 40 seconds as HP described. I hope  I would get attention and very professional guys would reply me to the current problem I have.

Also this is to the HP support: Make a way to contact to a real HP person in real time. I tried to contact one two days ago but I could since I needed the product id which was removed from my laptop. I hope this concern will change it for the future. Thanks All for reaching until the end 🙂

[WAWood]

@Jugert 

Leaving it running OR starting it back up in a short period of time seriously increases the risk of circuit damage.  You should have bagged it in rice and left it untouched for a couple of days -- at least!

From your comments, it looke likely that SOME damage was done. The key problems are only the surface and almost certainly, more damage was done than that.

The ONLY way to know for sure is to take or send it to an HP Service Center and pay a LOT of money for them to run full diagnostics on it, and after that, to disassemble it to repair or replace any damaged components.

And, if the motherboard is damaged, the cost of repair can easily exceed the cost of replacing the laptop -- because (as far as I know) liquid spill damage is NOT covered under the warranty.

If you live in the U.S., here is a link to the HP Service Repair Centers:
https://www.service-center-locator.com/hp-hewlett-packard/hp-hewlett-packard-service-center.htm

If you live outside the U.S., here is a link to HP Service Centers, by Country/Region: https://support.hp.com/in-en/service-center