I'd expect the $5 for 35 drives to be as worthwhile as buying a lottery
ticket.. with very little expectations of finding a good drive.
Entertainment only.
Regardless of what the seller said.. likewise, watch a lottery commercial.

Detective Harry Callahan of the SFPD might suggest that you ask yourself one
question.. Do you feel lucky?

A P1 PC, even if it was working yesterday, is another stroke of luck. When
was the BIOS battery last replaced with a NEW one?

I dunno if there's any harm in checking HDDs with just a PSU (no data cable)
just to see if they spin up without smoke or weird noises, but that may be a
worthwhile first step.

Many years ago, I performed some (486) BIOS hot swaps to get machines
running again, but hardly worth the effort for a motherboard with no
documentation, as there are sometimes jumpers that need to be changed.

If the drives spin up with power applied, then it's probably safe to connect
them to a working, disposable PC as Slave drives, or with an external USB
case.

Even if the drives seem to be working properly, they wouldn't be a good
choice for storing useful data, since they're already probably over a decade
old and their histories are unknown (dropped, previous PSU failures etc).

Any value might be attained from removing the small fasteners and scrapping
the rest.. although some like to save the magnets and other parts.
The heads are obviously very sensitive, and could be useful as inductive
pickups.

--
Cheers,
WB
..............


"klem kedidelhopper" wrote in message
...
I really hope that someone can help me with this. I have a P233 with
American Megatrends AMI bios.This computer was working perfectly but
has been sitting without drives in it for a couple of months. I just
returned from a Ham Fest yesterday with a box of 35 hard drives which
I bought for 5.00 The drives range in size from 1 to 15 GBTS. My
intention was to try these drives in a known working computer without
a hard drive to see if any of them would come up. What I planned on
doing was to go into bios before post and try to auto detect the
drive.Then I was going to format that good drive and add it to another
working computer which I'm presently using. Then I planned to copy my
pertinent files from the existing C drive to the new D drive. I
reasoned that even if the unknown drive had a virus, it could only
affect the RAM in which case a power cycle on/off would clear that and
so installing it into a stripped down box could not harm the computer
in any way. I've tested drives like this before without any problem it
seems. Afterward formatting would take care of any virus.

Well apparently I was wrong. Things didn't work out the way I had
hoped. The first drive I selected came right up without my first going
into bios and auto detecting it. How it did that without my first auto
detecting it made no sense to me. I would have expected to se some
message along with some beeps telling me that the configuration was
wrong and directing me into bios to correct it. Initially during this
boot up the screen had some logo talking about a server of some kind
and then I saw something about Linux. Then there was miles it seemed
of code displayed on the screen one line after another. It looked like
a program was unpacking or something but I'm not sure. Finally the
computer just hung. I turned it off and then on again. I managed to
access the bios screen and auto detected the drive. I also changed the
date and updated the configuration to show just a master and one 3.5
floppy. Everything seemed as it should be. I then exited bios saving
the configuration however it never completed post. I then tried a
power cycle again and this time the bios screen came up with gibberish
super imposed on it. After this and repeated tries I was not able to
get into bios again. My son suggested a possible "bios virus". I had
no idea that such a thing was possible. Isn't bios ROM? That being the
case how can something "write" to it? I pulled the battery overnight
and this morning re installed it. Everything is pulled except the RAM
and the video board. I then tried it again. The first time it let me
into bios. I noted that the date as well as the configuration was
wrong so I assumed I dumped everything that was not burned into the
chip. I did the re configuration, saved and exited but now its not
letting me back into bios again. And it's not completing post either.
It's really frustrating and discouraging to realize that I have now
apparently damaged a previously good machine by performing a seemingly
innocent act. Does anyone have any ideas what happened and if there
might be a way to correct it? Any help would be most sincerely
appreciated. Lenny