I have this vintage pc that I dug up and recently powered on, the hard drive seems to be failing (sector read errors) but I have a bunch of floppy disks i tried running today and it still works as long as it's running from the floppy and doesn't need to be installed first.
If you guys are interested, I'll post it running some things tomorrow. There's a bunch of things I want to do with it like try to replace the hard drive, get it online, and get a compiler so I can port programs or write new ones for it. Maybe install linux if that's a possibility on 6MB of RAM.
not that you shouldn't replace the drive anyway, but...
depending on the drive epoch (I am guessing its ide/ata not ST-506) you could try a factory format. with the right drive and phase of the moon, the on-drive controller may actually go off and do it for real instead of faking it. its usually worth a try an old drive just for funsies.
I want to see what (if anything) i can copy from the drive, and then I'll give this a shot and see how much mileage I can get out of it!
gotcha. you likely know this already, but throw a little ddrescue - data recovery tool at it and let it marinate for a while.
however, depending on the state of the drive and ddrescue recovery option intensity, there might not be much left of the drive once it melts through the desk.
have fun!