leileilol wrote on 2023-01-07, 04:23:

I'd suggest having an F-PROT boot disk handy, as a boot sector virus can potentially cause that problem. If your BIOS has a virus check option (which checks for boot sector modifications) that's also useful..

actually I think it might have been power fluctuations in the building destabilizing the drive. but I don't even know. first that AT power supply on the other computer exploded and now the boiler just caught fire again. not even joking. I keep having a repeated argument about replacing it or installing cooling fans or a new exhaust. nope. my house is full of smoke again and I wasted another fire extinguisher.

I'll enable the BIOS virus protection as suggested. I'm also thinking its time to go full RAID mirror. personally I think my furnace guy owes me three days of my life I want back. I have to start all over and its absolutely infuriating.

CONCLUSION OF ISSUE SUMMARY:
launcherbox was the best solution. I may never know what dad did on his machine but at least we got ours working and back to the same level as his.

the backup machine is ready and waiting in case of issues with the faster machine.

the old boards in dad's machine tested good individually. just don't play ball together. those will go to the selling floor.

booting could not be resolved with software so a physical adapter was made and installed. cutting power physically to the win2k drive.

FreeDOS was abandoned due to memory/ lack of documentation issues.

DOS 6.22 was fixed in memmaker. this was user failure on my part because I looked away during install and missed vital hints and being told about it confused me as to where to enter it. once I saw that I remembered your advice and entered it as installation instructed. issue resolved. documentation has arrived to further supplement knowledge. (like I said, I'm painfully new at this) keen is detecting a full meg of ram in various system levels. good enough there.

a variety of video cards are on there way along with a different motherboard that is more advanced. should solve DVI SVGA jittering. ether by compatibility or brute force.

mystery drive was found to be a ZIP disk.

RAID issues may need a bios update to further fix known issues.

any further issues that are unrelated will go in new threads as this one is finished. this may occur in the next week and a half as I finish up other stuff and get free time to explore other system options.