I have a Delll M4400 (I don't this is model related, but what do I know!) It has been working fine. A week ago I spilled about 2 oz of plain water on the keyboard (more toward the lower right hand corner). I quickly pushed the power button until it shut down. Pulled the A/C cord and battery. Grabbed paper towels and patted down keyboard. Then toook compressed air and blew it as dry as I could. Pulled the bottom panel and saw no water at all. Put it over A/C vent all night hooked everything back up and worked like a charm. About 3 days goes buy and I go to start it up one morning and it looked weird from the start. I did not get a "F2 - Setup" note, but I did get a F12 - Boot Options (later found out it would not work). Got the long white bar about windows loading files. It then went to "Windows Error Recovery", but I was unable to arrow through choices. It then went to the little short greenish bars right above "Microsoft Corporation". (Add in) It has a backlit keyboard and it never goes out since this started. From this point it ran for 16 hours. It does this everytime you boot it. I can't enter "Safe Mode", it will not perform any function from a DVD drive. Windows 7, Vista and tried Ultimate Boot CD and none would work. I got G-Parted to run through a lot of stuff and it was giving a ton of ACPI errors, but when it got to the thing about keyboard map that was it - no more. I tried to load Knoppix for the hell of it it and it ran through a bunch of stuff that could not keep up with. Any ideas beside trash it. I just don't know how to proceed when I don't have another hard drive to check with. Not another computer to check with. I don't know of any other software to try. With the backlit keyboard constantly staying on be a sign the it shot now that it has gotten wet. It used to worked perfect and will not ever get another home computer without it. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks
Better try to take out the hard drive from the laptop.. check for any wet spots.. even if not do complelete dry all the parts.. n then try to boot
if you know how to disassemble your laptop, then that is what you need to do. you need to disassemble it and dry every board, device, nook and cranny of that thing. this should have been the first thing that was done after the accident. probably should have not put it on an AC to dry either--for one because an AC blows out air that has a ton of moisture in it so you did not dry anything from doing this but potentially gave it more moisture than it had to begin with. you could have blown some particles such as dust or other debris into it from this along with other things that would not help matters at all... look on dell's website for disassembly guides as they do have them, just follow them exactly and don't lose any screws. it sounds to me like you hdd got wet from the spill and now it is acting faulty. you could have ruined it completely. it could be the motherboard too though. it could be completely toast, which is a shame, but it is very possible. matters such as this are time critical. that's why disassembly should have been done immediately. here's hoping giving it a "proper" drying helps you sorry for your troubles mate.
I would suggest to disassemble and dry it as suggested before. I once worked on a Dell Mini 10v that was having boot issues and figured out it was a keyboard problem by starting it without the keyboard attached. If this is possible on your machine I would give it a shot as well. Essentially try to disconnect everything that is not absolutely needed for booting and then start adding things back in to find the problem.