Accessing and salvaging parts of laptop that had water spilled on it

[dovidgottesman]

Water was spilled on my mother in laws laptop, and was then plugged in and tried to power on. Basically all the wrong stuff and I only got to it a week later. When the laptop is powered on, it powers off a second later. The keyboard backlight blinks, and nothing else. I am no professional, so we are assuming for now the machine is beyond repair. So I took out the battery, HDD, memory and optical drive. The main thing that is important to them is the data on the hard drive, and I actually have a hard drive caddy for the optical bay of a laptop which I got for myself. My question is twofold
1) is it safe for my laptop to try to access this hard drive? Is it safe for the drive?
2) turns out this laptop had a single 8 Gb memory stick, more than what I have. Is it safe to salvage?

 

[electro_neanderthal]

As long as the parts are dry it should be safe to attempt to connect the HDD. The RAM should also be alright to try (again, assuming it's dry) since the laptop won't start if something is wrong. Just make sure the contacts aren't corroded or any physical damage is visible.