Stiltzkin

I accidentally spilt water into my laptop while it was on... it is a really stupid story, so let us not delve into how it happened. Anyways, it shut off, and refuses to turn on anymore. I immediately took it to where I bought it from (Best Buy) and they told me they can't do anything about it. They told me if I had a warranty (which I don't) the best they could do is replace it, but not even that would've been possible since the damage is my fault. So I call up Toshiba support (it is a Toshiba Satellite A10/A15 series laptop) and I get to their laptop tech support. They're going to send me a box, then I put my laptop in there, and ship it back to them.

A few things first though...
I spent several hours figuring out how to take the laptop apart and was finally able to do so. I'm fairly sure the motherboard is what got damaged, though. Would it be possible to actually just order a replacement motherboard myself instead of sending it all the way to them? Also, there's no way in hell that I'm going to let go of the data I have on that HD, I have way too much sensitive, rare, extremely important data, and no I don't mean porn. A friend of mine said a laptop's HD won't connect to a normal IDE, so is there any way for me to back up that data onto my desktop?

Many, many thanks in advance.

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