The Compaq 386 Portable arrived in the mail today. It boots from
the floppy just fine, but the HDD is not recognized by fdisk,
though it does spin up. If I had some other system with a 5.25"
floppy I might try a different OS...
The system has IDE, so I'll try another drive or two out. The
one that this came with is not the stock one. It spins up, so
maybe I'll try it on a USB->IDE converter and see if I can read
anything on it from my main computer.
Everything else on the system looks to be in good working order.
Worse case scenario is the IDE controller has failed, in which
case it's still a working floppy-based system with two 16-bit
IDE slots... I suppose I could put an IDE controller in one of
those in a pinch.