Many hours of my life were spent on this. I was up until 3 am. Then back on it this morning. The ending is happy, though.
My Pentium 500 running DOS started booting with a "hard drive failure imminent" message. Which I would have cheerfully ignored except you had to hit F1 to continue. Google says that's one of the four times in history a hard drive warned it was about to fail before it failed.
So... what do? Vertical Pi images all look like ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- and have way too many games. Fine. I'll hobble this bastard along.
Start digging through a shitpile and find a compact flash drive and IDE adapter that I had no idea I owned.
Pull out hard drive, open up old Goodwill computer, jumper the ATX supply so I can power it, hook up to my desktop with an IDC -> USB adapter. Dump the contents of the old drive into a backup folder. Hooray.
Thanks to various "undocumented windows features" where it doesn't copy ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- even though you tell it to, this compact flash drive refuses to boot when everything is copied back over.
So I burn a Win98 SE disc (remember Win98?) and attempt to install it on the compact flash drive. If I bypass scandisk, it won't boot after installation. If I go through the scandisk process, it says about 5% of the drive is bad. I literally wedge a piece of cardboard on the enter key and let it pound "FIX IT" for over an hour. Oh yeah, also had to bust out the one PS2 (remember PS2?) keyboard I have.
Okay, so Windows installs. Still won't boot. If I boot off the CD, tell it to go to the command prompt, everything runs fine.
FDISK /MBR didn't fix it.
At this point I throw the old drive back in and ponder adding an F1 key to my panel. No, no, can't do that. Take it back out.
And go back to Google. Finally a search for something like "fresh Win98 install won't boot"
Turns out I had to do.... wait for it...
wait for it....
Wait for it....
format c: /s
Once I did that, I was booting to a DOS prompt. Didn't bother trying to install Windows again.
Hooked the drive back up to my other computer, dumped the contents of the backup onto it (skipping the existing files like command.com and such).
And....
Here...
we....
go....