That Classic II can be revived most of the time with a recapping. There will be broken/rotten traces to deal with however. If you think it's too much then like it is said, send it to Uniserver. He's great in recapping and repairs. And the price is right too.
With the Classic, you can boot the internal ROM Drive with Option-Apple-X-O. This will load up System 6.0.8 in the ROM (the only Mac to have this option...). From there you can test your hard drives and check their content. You can even swap out the Classic hard drive with the Classic II hard drive and check on it as well.
You need a minimum of 4MB of RAM for System 7. But if it boots and is working, you do not need to reinstall it. You should at least rebuild the DeskTop by holding down Option-Apple during booting. In its history, there only has been some 30 viruses in the Mac System, so there is little worry on that. Getting the last version of Disinfectant and run it will clean things up if you think there is a chance of being infected.
Making a Mac Boot Disk on a PC is not easy and it does not work on the SE with an 800K Drive, The Mac Plus, Mac 512K/128K, and Some Mac IIs with the 800K Drives. They only work on Macs with high density drives, and even then you need to get the format right or it won't work. It is much easier to have another older Mac like a PowerBook to make Boot Disks and leave PCs out of the equation.
You can also get a copy of StuffIt to compress larger files and divide them up to fit on on or more high density disks. Better would be getting a SCSI CD-Burner and burn copies of the stuff on the hard drive onto a CD. You can make a bootable CD but that is a bit tricky to do, best to do it as an archiving tool. A working Zip/Jazz Drive will also work well.
If you are going to recap the logic board (as in the case with the Classic II to bring it back to life and on the Classic as a preventative measure), it is best to recap the analog board at the same time. Light usage or not, some caps fail whether you use the machine or not while others fail from heavy usage. Best to get that fixed up and get that situation away.
With the Classic, you can boot the internal ROM Drive with Option-Apple-X-O. This will load up System 6.0.8 in the ROM (the only Mac to have this option...). From there you can test your hard drives and check their content. You can even swap out the Classic hard drive with the Classic II hard drive and check on it as well.
You need a minimum of 4MB of RAM for System 7. But if it boots and is working, you do not need to reinstall it. You should at least rebuild the DeskTop by holding down Option-Apple during booting. In its history, there only has been some 30 viruses in the Mac System, so there is little worry on that. Getting the last version of Disinfectant and run it will clean things up if you think there is a chance of being infected.
Making a Mac Boot Disk on a PC is not easy and it does not work on the SE with an 800K Drive, The Mac Plus, Mac 512K/128K, and Some Mac IIs with the 800K Drives. They only work on Macs with high density drives, and even then you need to get the format right or it won't work. It is much easier to have another older Mac like a PowerBook to make Boot Disks and leave PCs out of the equation.
You can also get a copy of StuffIt to compress larger files and divide them up to fit on on or more high density disks. Better would be getting a SCSI CD-Burner and burn copies of the stuff on the hard drive onto a CD. You can make a bootable CD but that is a bit tricky to do, best to do it as an archiving tool. A working Zip/Jazz Drive will also work well.
If you are going to recap the logic board (as in the case with the Classic II to bring it back to life and on the Classic as a preventative measure), it is best to recap the analog board at the same time. Light usage or not, some caps fail whether you use the machine or not while others fail from heavy usage. Best to get that fixed up and get that situation away.