Unresponsive after water damage, what are my options?

[Windows Central Question]

Unresponsive after water damage

I found my Nokia lumia 520 trying to swim after a bottle of water leaked its contents in to my bag, I took it out straight out and it appeared to be working fine after giving it a quick dry. However a few hours later the screen became unresponsive. I now took my phone apart and left it drying in a bowl of rice for a few days, to no avail. My Phone will turn on, (off is trickier since it requires swiping down, so you have to remove the battery,) and the volume buttons work, on top of this it also charges. Therefore the only problem is that its unresponsive. Previously I have cracked my screen, leading to it being unresponsive(,similarly to this issue,) and brought a new screen and digitizer off eBay, this has successfully fixed the issue. Is there a way to fix this, or do you think buying a new screen and digitizer would resolve the issue?

 

[xandros9]

Re: Unresponsive after water damage

1. I think the first problem was that you tried to continue using it immediately after its swim.
At that point, I feel you've let the water cause damage that won't go away from drying properly since damage is already done.

I suppose you could try a new digitizer, but the fact water damage is involved, you may see cascading failures (as in parts failing one after the other) since we can't know for sure what the water did. It could just be the touchscreen, it could be something critical on the main board...

 

[Jan Wijngaard]

Re: Unresponsive after water damage

I had nearly the exact same problem last year. I stupidly tried to turn the phone on after I let it dry for a few hours. I should have taken it fully apart and left in a bowl of rice for at least a day or over night. Anyway, after thinking this was the end, I tried a hard reset. I was worried I'd lose everything, however most my info was backed up on the cloud and all my photos where saved to an SD card. After holding down the buttons to start the hard reset, to my surprise the phone started to go through the process of re booting from scratch (a spinning cog then some start up options) one of the options was to restore the phone from my last back up. After it finished the phone was back up and running! Maybe this will help you too, unless you have already tried it.