Which [user] HDD type was the HDD originally installed as?

Without this information it is hard to proceed, because it is well possible that there was used a formatter (Ontrack, Speedstor etc which booted its own driver, which set the correct HDD type stored in the bootstrap.

The "dir" output only shows that the HDD data is there, but the C/H/S setting is wrong, resulting in total garbage.

Edit: Try using a 6-head HDD type with at most 820cyls. If a driver is on the HDD, it will correct the data so that the data at the end of the HDD can be accessed.

Yes, agree to that. I have also read that it may result in data loss when using another controller than the disk was formatted with, but this does not seem to be the case here.

Dont give up, you are almost there!

I would propose you put Norton Diskedit on your bootdisk and take a look at the structure. You should be able to identify the MBR and the directory structure and take a look whats in.

Hi guys, i had a bit time to play around.
After trying a Dos 3.31 bootdisk i could see the root dir (at least part oif it), with bios hdd type 40, which should be tzhe correct number for that HDD. Still it wouldn't give me the command line back and at post i got an drive c: error.
Some other settings (733/5/17) gave me the inside of the dos dir when doing a "dir c:" and no error in post. So there is still something.
Is there a way to extract or better guess the correct c/h/s-settings. Or could it still be, that the drive is damaged somehow?

greetings

The reason why I asked for looking in the "source" computers' BIOS setup for determining the C/H/S values is just that back in that time these values were very often set incorrectly.
As the size of the HDD was just enormous (at least from the perspective back then) many people did not bother whether they got 35 or 40 megabytes, they were just happy when they succeeded to get the drive formatted and did not care anymore.

Aside of that (very easy) way of finding the correct values there is the (very difficult) alternative to analyze the drive with a disk editor to find out the actual CHS values being used. But that is far from simple, it requires thorough knowledge of the partition table, MBR and FAT filesystem internals.

So I again advise to spend a few minutes to find what was the BIOS setting.

Or just ditch the data and make a clean low level format using the correct drive settings.

As said, put Norton Diskedit on your boot floppy and send us a screenshot of the mbr (1st sector). Then you get an idea what the structure on your disk is. You can also browse the directory strcuture. Very useful and powerful programm, easy to use. You can even make a dump of your drive to a file on i.e. a network drive and reconstruct on your windows pc.