HP pavilion laptop won't get past the loading screen

[ubertaco]

Hey guys, about a couple of days ago I spilled some drink on my laptop (I know stupid me) so I removed the battery and dried it off and turned it upside down for the night. Next day I turned it on and then it wouldn't get past the loading screen. I can access the BIOS fine. Its an hp laptop with windows vista home premium. I tried just about everything, start up repair, safe mode, everything. There isn't any restore points for system restore, and chkdsk said its fine. I ran a startup test and it passed but when I ran the hard disk test it failed. Should I just back up everything and buy a new hard drive?

[Zocom]

If chkdsk says the HDD is fine, I'd just go get a copy of windows and see if it works. Actually if you can, burn a copy of ubuntu and install that. If it works then great! If it doesn't I'd change out the HDD preferably under warranty.