We had a coffee spillage here, resulting in a sad macbook. Two little things to come out of it though:

• Taking hard drives out of mac books is actually relatively painless. It merely involves 3 screws, a likkle screwdriver and an L-plate behind the battery.
• A little external hard drive case (nicely provided by Darran) can save a lot of bother. Simply remove the hard drive, insert it into the case, plug into another computer and with any luck your hard drive is up and running