Laptop went for a swim, Help me get the contents of my time machined/boot camped hard drive back!

Question

So unfortunately my old 13" MacBook Pro got a drink spilled across it a few months back. Mr Genius at the Apple store took one look inside and shook his head "Catastrophic failure, It's hit the fan and gone everywhere". But it wasnt all bad news, He did pull the hard drive out and told me to get an enclosure for it. So I have My hard drive in an enclosure and all the contents are there, I now have a new 13" Macbook Pro sitting in front of me which i purchased yesterday but its not all going to plan... I need help with 2 things.
1. My Home folder on the mac side had file vault turned on.
It was running snow leopard OS X but I cant remember what version it was on at the time. What ever was out in March would be close enough. So I was hoping to boot from an external drive by restarting the computer, holding down option and then selecting which drive to boot from. It looks promising as I restart the computer with the hard drive unplugged and hold down option. Macintosh HD, Recovery HD come up, I plug in the external drive and Macintosh HD1 and Windows then appear as Yellow USB drives. BUT when I click on the Macintosh HD1 i get the grey screen with an apple on it but thats it.
Insert Ideas For Problem 1 Here.....
2. The other half of the hard drive was dedicated to windows.
I'm an Engineer by trade and a lot of the software I use is windows based so I ran Windows 7 on half the hard drive. Booting from the external drive and selecting windows getsd a fair way into the start up process before i get a flicker of a blue screen and the whole computer re starts. What Im wondering is can I create a partition the same size as the old one and then just drop the contents of the external drive which was windows running on a partition in? It would be way easier than trying to start from scratch. I had all kinds of stuff going on in the windows side relating to connecting to the neetwork at work and I'd rather not go through it all again.
Any help or advice is much appreciated!

Answer 1

LOL
Water ingress is a nasty thing, which is why it tends to do things like void warranties for example.
When a device like this gets fully immersed in water and is subsequently dried out, there can remain deposits of gunk on the circuit boards, which conduct electricity and thus contribute to discharging the battery much faster.
Water can even seep inside integrated circuits and wreak havoc in there.
Sooner or later your phone is going to give up the ghost so I suggest you start reading through the fine print on your home insurance policy to see if it covers appliances going for a swim without a swim suit.
A last-ditch operation you can try in an attempt to clean any impurities that may have deposited inside the phone, and I know this sounds nuts, is to drown it again, but this time in demineralized water (like the stuff you're supposed to put in your iron).
Take the battery out, dunk the phone in the water for a few minutes. Then take it out, drain it, stick it in a bowl and cover it in uncooked rice, put the bowl of phone risotto in a warm place (such as an airing cupboard) and leave it there to simmer for 48 hours.
One of three things will happen:
1) Nothing. No better, no worse. At least you tried.
2) Problem solved or at least situation improved. Yay!
3) Phone worse off or maybe even completely dead. This was going to happen anyway sooner or later.
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