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I recently pulled an old 1990 Macintosh Classic from my Dad's garage that had been sitting there for nearly 15 years. I plugged it in, and was delighted that turning the switch did something. The screen came on gray, a little smiley computer face was there for a bit, and then it was replaced by a disk with a question mark on it.

All the while I could hear that the hard drive was having some issues. It was spinning, making some clicking noises, and then maybe every 30-40 seconds it would stope spinning, rest for a second, and then try again.

I have attached a video of the HD doing this while the cover was off. Is there any hope that I can boot this old drive? I would love to get access to the old files that were on it.

Thanks in advance!

Youtube link.

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    It sounds like the drive is bad (the question mark means "cannot load system files," IIRC). You may be able to recover data but it would be a bad idea to try to boot from it.
    – user55325
    Jan 30, 2014 at 17:36

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The drive is dead. It needs to go to a data recovery service to get any data off of it. They can be expensive. It's up to you whether it's worth it.

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