Well thank you all for your replies, they've certainly made for interesting reading. One thing that has struck me is the strong aversion to using a boot manager, but no-one has quite explained why they are taking such steps to avoid such a thing. To my mind, it strikes me as a simple and elegant …

I'm not sure I like constantly changing the active partition in order to avoid using a boot manager, though it may be something to consider if that really doesn't work out. I don't think the 2GB limitation will be a big problem for DOS or Windows 3.1, but I may use MS-DOS 7.10 and FAT32 for the …

I realise that this is resurrecting an old thread but I'm dying to know what happened - was the PC ever repaired? Did you find out what the issue was?

Some time tomorrow I intend to get to work on my all purpose legacy PC. The plan is to have the machine running DOS, DOS with Windows 3.1 and Windows 98SE with MS-DOS 7.10. The two DOS partitions will also be running software to slow the computer down significantly. In order to achieve this goal, I …