[Someone]

> but evidently there was a component or two that had gone bad

The disk head got stuck because the head was ‘glued’ to the platter by stiction (https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1051141, https://hardrecoveryman.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/release-of-...; a fairly common issue in the day for certain brands of hard disk, and he did a quick and dirty ‘repair’, first by trying to get it unstuck through inertia, then by opening the enclosure and forcing the head to get unstuck.

He likely did not use a clean room, so that repair probably was temporary.

> and then started looking through its contents by dumping it to the screen (sorta like if you look at a raw hex dump from dd or a tool like Spinrite)

They ‘just’ booted the disk and used the ProDOS CATALOG command (or its shorthand CAT) to list the files on the disk.

[aasasd]

I nearly fainted reading about how the dude whacked the disk to make the head unstick and then jiggled the head over the platter. One thing I learned in my tech initiation years is that head on the platter = death and woe.

Also, judging from how pallets with containers of old stuff were dropped right beside the guys, and how they were going through the hardware by throwing it up in the air, it sounds like the environment was the opposite of clean.