Thanks to ivo for a spare 9GB hard drive, and to moonwick for burning me a handy Debian boot CD, my old PII-300 is back up and running. The second drive in the machine is still intact, which contains most of everything I wanted to keep. However, the boot drive, which contained my current email inbox plus an old install of Windows NT that probably still had stuff I wanted to keep, appears dead.

I am working on an automated backup solution that doesn't rely on fallible me. Looks like I need to have hardware fail every so often to remind myself that it will continue to do so, and I need to be prepared for it.