[lAwrencex]

my girlfriend owns a imac g3 (700 mhtz w/cd-rw) and it appears as if someone has placed a glass of water on top of it and the water had spilled into the system. now when you plug it in the inside sparks and a small amount of flames burst out of the board and the machine begins smoking. the machine won't turn on and wont do anything. is there any way to salvage this wreck, or anything from inside it (hard drive, cd-rw, etc.)? it was very upsetting to her and she doesnt even know who the culprit is (no one in her house would fess up). if anyone has experienced this in the past or can be of any help whatsoever please post. thanks.

[malvolio]

That sucks.
I very much doubt that you can restore the poor thing after the sparks and flames. But you can at least open it up and fairly easily remove the hard drive, RAM, and cd-rw, and see if any of them are still functional.

[lAwrencex]

how would i go about checking the functionality of those items? my girlfriend really wants to save the hard drive, she had all sorts of papers for grad school on there.

[malvolio]

You can try either putting the hard drive into another Mac or into a Firewire enclosure.
When I upgraded recently, I took the hard drive from my old G3 iMac and put it into a Firewire enclosure that I got for about $60. Cheap way to get an external hard drive.
Same principle for the RAM and cd drive - try them out in another iMac.