I finally got some time to look into this again, decided to start by eliminating bios disk settings first. Tried forcing the pio mode to various levels instead of taking "auto" but that didn't seem to help. IDE Hdd block mode was another I'd read about but it's on which the Internet seems to say is good. I do have a question though about the disk layout I've taken the auto setting ( https://ibb.co/TPjL7Xc ) but there seems to be a wizard I can run through on main bios page to nail these values down. I assume if it had the layout of the disk wrong, everything would be hot garbage in obvious ways but should I run through that wizard and have it nail up those values? It's a 3.2gb Samsung disk if that matters.