Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...
I've had this happen too. Mostly seems to be a Maxtor/Quantum "thing", but any HDD with an on-disk head parking area is susceptible to this. The ones that shouldn't have this issue are HDDs with dedicated head parking ramps off the disk, like IBM/Hitachi. That said, I'm surprised you found a laptop HDD with this issue. Most laptop HDDs I've opened had dedicated head parking ramps (though certainly not all of them.)
Nice score on those laptops.
I also got 2 large boxes full of old PII/3 Dell Latitude CPi/CPx. Got them over a decade ago as e-scrap from the IT dept. of a place I volunteered. Didn't think of them much back then, but figured they might be worth something someday when they get old enough and since they are built well and have serial/parallel ports. Some years ago, I went ahead and put an OS on all of them that could to get them tested and possibly ready for sale. Haven't tried selling any yet, though. But last I checked, all of the HDDs I put in them worked OK, and all of the HDDs I used were about the same age as the systems (i.e. 20+ years now.) No issue with any of them whatsoever, though I'm keeping an eye on a few of the IBM/Hitachi Travelstars that are known to have problems. I'm expecting all of those to fail with use / enough hours. But just sitting the way they are in a box - probably will be fine as is for a long time.
I've had this happen too. Mostly seems to be a Maxtor/Quantum "thing", but any HDD with an on-disk head parking area is susceptible to this. The ones that shouldn't have this issue are HDDs with dedicated head parking ramps off the disk, like IBM/Hitachi. That said, I'm surprised you found a laptop HDD with this issue. Most laptop HDDs I've opened had dedicated head parking ramps (though certainly not all of them.)
Nice score on those laptops.
I also got 2 large boxes full of old PII/3 Dell Latitude CPi/CPx. Got them over a decade ago as e-scrap from the IT dept. of a place I volunteered. Didn't think of them much back then, but figured they might be worth something someday when they get old enough and since they are built well and have serial/parallel ports. Some years ago, I went ahead and put an OS on all of them that could to get them tested and possibly ready for sale. Haven't tried selling any yet, though. But last I checked, all of the HDDs I put in them worked OK, and all of the HDDs I used were about the same age as the systems (i.e. 20+ years now.) No issue with any of them whatsoever, though I'm keeping an eye on a few of the IBM/Hitachi Travelstars that are known to have problems. I'm expecting all of those to fail with use / enough hours. But just sitting the way they are in a box - probably will be fine as is for a long time.
Now I'm older and grayer and trying to kindle that "can do" mentality in my kids! so.... 
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