Stopwatch cursor issue in Workbench

[TribbleSmasher]

How long did you wait? Maybe you set a ridiculus large jpeg as the wallpaper and the machine is on its knees to decode it.

Or,
as your Workbench is set to window-mode, there might be another applications window behind that awaiting your input.

[TribbleSmasher]

There are endless possibilities, really.
When your harddrive LED is on, the computer might try to repair the harddrive (validating). Or you put something in the WBStartup folder that needs to quit first by itself.
Or you have a setup that is waiting for a specific hardware or connection ....

[TribbleSmasher]

If the machine is booting well from a Workbench floppy disk you can certainly have a peek onto the harddrive partitions, maybe you find the culprit.

[TribbleSmasher]

Revisiting your provided picture, something occured to me:
Your harddrive is not internal, but this Overdrive external connected to the PCMCIA slot!
That explaines the CC0 has 29kB in size, as the plug contains a "fake disk" with the driver.
Some of those Overdrives required an adapter to the floppy port for stealing 12V to supply the usually big harddisk. Do you have this too?

I guess the hd is indeed near death. If you really need the data on this drive you should get an adapter of some sort to create an image of it before try and rescue files.

As a replacement you would need a cheap CF card adapter and a small (1-4 GByte for example) industrial CF card that would fit internally. It will be a little bit slower than the external one but delivers more comfort. Just make sure you pick a compatible CF card.

[TribbleSmasher]

The problem with the external harddrive is the connection. You basicly loose the easy way of transfering files via the PCMCIA to CF cards.
You can still boot a floppy disk that is almost empty and only consists of some commands (dir, copy, info) and a startup-sequence in folder s.
But without some routine this could be an annoying and frustrating experience.

It would be the best if you can get some personal help from an user nearby.