I've apparently got a bad boot sector on this machines HD. I can boot from DOS floppy just fine. I reformatted this drive about a year ago and reinstalled the OS and a particular mailing list mgt program (which is my whole reason for this dated scenario). On boot, system evaluates both a SCSII Flex Drive and SCSII Fixed Drive - both of which are not getting found. Just wondering what odds are that I'll be able to do a good reformat, install. Or would I be better to seek out a new drive. And where would I look for one that is a match for this vintage-like carcase? Thanks in advance.

The software will probably run on newer hardware as long as you're using dos. So if you have a problem fixing what you have you might look at something like an older, but easier to find, pentium I. Then at least you'd be able to use a regular IDE drive. But take a look at the drive(s) you're currently using. Maybe the problem is just a bad or loose cable.

Thanks - the reformat and DOS install went smoothly. I've reinstalled the mailing list program (ARCLIST)and all is well again. I would like to move off this dependency on the problematic scsii drive - so will pursue your rec regarding Pentium I and more std IDE drives. Prob via Craig's List. Thank you for that thought.

You shouldn't have to pay more than $15 or so for a good P-I, especially if you have some experience and can work on one that's not running. Check places like goodwill and garage sales.

great .. now you are talking about the whole box (chassis, motherbd/cpu, drives, power supply, etc.) huh?! If I have a machine, as I think I do in the garage that came with Win95 installed (which was about as stable as the Dow/NASDAQ lately) - can I wipe that image clean and install just DOS on it? And then is it reasonable to think that this OS would interact correctly with the IDE drive and CPU etc? Or is this a path frought with trouble? There may be a ridiculous question in there somewhere.

You can wipe the drive just by formatting it. The only consideration might be the drive size. Dos 6.22 installs on a fat16 partition which can be no larger than 2 gig. It's possible to partition a drive larger than that with a 2 gig primary partition and a the rest of the space as an extended partition. But to keep things simple you'd probably want a drive no larger than 2 gig. If the PC in your garage is at least a P-I it almost certainly has on-board IDE ports and an existing IDE drive. You might want to post back info on that computer--motherboard or PC model number, hard drive model number--so we can see what it's capable of.