Sometimes old stepper motor hard drives can be surprisingly resilient just because everything is bigger and chunkier and dumber. The bits on the platter are phy

Sometimes old stepper motor hard drives can be surprisingly resilient just because everything is bigger and chunkier and dumber. The bits on the platter are physically bigger. You can hand-crank the spindle motor to help it get going, oil the motor bearings if you need to, you can whack the side with a screwdriver to get the heads unstuck, you can brutally low-level format the entire thing to get it going again after the magnetic media has become corrupted... And even a more modern dead drive that could theoretically be resurrected might have firmware that refuses to continue when it discovers abnormal conditions -- a big dumb MFM drive will just power through it until the bearing grease gets unstuck, or whatever the case may be. If you have old drives like these they probably have a lot of years left in them still if one does what you do -- spin them up and let them exercise a little bit every once in a while.