It worked.
I ghost imaged my exisiting 2GB (only about 300MB is used) DOS partition on the 20GB disk to the secondary disk, then installed a 420MB ancient Conner in place of the 20GB, copied the image on to it, installed Corel 3.0 (without any glitch) and ghost copied the resulted partition into the 20GB again, and everything is nice and dandy.
Funny thing is, that Conner was apparently infected by an ancient virus (Junkie 1027A) and till I became aware of the situation, it infected all the HDDs on this machine and a few floppies, too. According to the database, it infects MBR of HDDs accessed *.com files and also floppy boot sectors. fortunately, F-Prot from 1997 is good enough to easily remove it. It was an unexpected little fun, considering I had nothing to do with viruses for the last 15 years or so 🤣
GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000