So yesterday I tried shorting the pads with tweezers and what I got was that the motor started to work differently, a little louder, but no selftest, just a quiet even "ticking" of the head for about 5 seconds (I guess it tries to find a track, but can't?), and then the motor would stop and the busy LED on the hard drive itself would flash. And yes, at one pad there is 5v, at the other a little more than 1, I also measured the second exactly the same element on the board and it is measured as 0 ohms. Tomorrow I will try it on a couple of other computers as I have a lot of work today.
There are 4 complete 286s with ther cases, 2 286 boards, VLB DX2 with S3 VLB video card (YAAY), PCI Socket 2 (didn't know this existed), socket 7 mb, socket 370 mb with 400MHz Celeron, slot 1 with 500MHz PenIII, 3 SB Vibra 16, ESS Audiodrive, and a lot now working (after cleaning) of two-button CD-ROMs, 10GB HDD and dead 6GB HDD. And all this for $44.44 from my college. I found it all among the garbage in the pantry of one of the teachers. He was going to take it to the metal yard for a penny. In the next session I will try to buy a bunch of hard drives from him (he said he will not sell until you copy the information from them)
