minfremi,
Nightshooter asked a very important question. Do you hear the hard drive starting up? It will make a noise like an airplane engine starting up. There is another way to wake up an old hard drive. Take a plastic handled screwdriver, hold it vertically by the metal tip and gently drop the plastic handle onto the screw that is the center spindle of the drive. That may jar the platters and free up the 'sticky grease' that is no longer lubricating the spindle. This method allows you to leave the drive intact. In order to do this, you must open up the plastic case --- but do not open the metal hard drive itself --- to see the hard drive and which nut holds the spindle.
Keep in mind that the original hard drive management software did not automatically park the heads. You specifically instructed the hard drive to 'park heads' every time you wanted to move your computer and/or external hard drive, just to be safe. If the drive heads are parked, they are off to the side of data blocks that matter. If the heads are not parked, they could damage a sector on the platter. That is why being gentle is important. The soft drop approach directs the energy exactly where you want it. Vertically on the spindle.
First check for the airplane engine noise and post back. If you are familiar enough with hard drives to understand the paragraph above, great. Otherwise, find a discarded PC that no one cares about, remove the hard drive from it, take that drive apart for the education, and then check back for further instructions.
The device we used in the shop for working on multiple macs was an external zip drive. Each zip disk would have a different OS. That way you could test drive an OS and optimize your computer for the nicest operation for the RAM you have before installing any updates to the hard drive you have.
Then check back with your progress.
Ji~m
