After buying a NEC V20, I thought I'd spend a lazy Sunday testing it out on my 5160. So off came the case (easy when you lose the damn screws during a house move argh!) and expansion cards and gently lifted the AMD 8088 to swap for a V20.

After installing, I fired her up and went through the 640K RAM check no problem. The usual beeps and then just a flashing cursor. "Great" I thought, a duff chip. So I swapped it back, reinstalled the cards (removing a few that weren't essential just in case), powered on and the same result. Bugger...
So I go hunting through my second hand 5.25" floppies and dug out a DOS 3.20 bootable, and she boots fine with that. Then I thought I'd try accessing the C-drive and alas, got the C: prompt. So far, so good. "DIR" also lists everything absolutely fine too. So it works it seems.

So I thought I'd try and run GEM that was on this when I got it (never reformatted this drive as I didn't have the software to do it properly) and I get a "Seek error reading drive C". Not so good... It does try and load regardless but it crashes even before the splash screen. Really annoying as about a month ago this was working 100%. Gotta love how we torture ourselves with this hobby. 🙄 Anyway, finding a working original IBM Seagate HD won't be easy and alternative solutions are pretty much out of the question given like the HD, how expensive they are to find now (working atleast).

So I'm going to need some kind of software that can check the disk for errors. CHKDSK tells me all the info on capacity and what's used/free/etc, bit not the condition of it. My question is what options do I have? I really am limited with software as I have no means of easily making disks nor do I have the hardware to somehow network and transfer (which again would be difficult without a working HD).

P.S. Do these old Seagate drives need to be parked? I'm rather hoping they don't as this may be why I'm now getting issues and it's genuinely concerning me now.