Well, mate, I tried an MBR fix -but it wouldn't: 'Can't write MBR' was the
message.
Moved the non-booting hard drives to a known good machine and started from
scratch with them.
Used partition magic to shrink the used partitons then move them down the
disk. Then used FDISK to set up a new primary DOS active partition on each
of them, and then installed DOS 6.22.
Replaced the hard drives back into the original machine, the one they
failed to boot in, and . . . they worked fine !
Either one will boot into DOS okay with no issues now.
The big question now is: 'What caused the non-booting problem, and how to
avoid it in the future' ?
I have noticed a couple of posts in other newsgroups reporting similar
problems in the past week or so.
So, I'm concerned that we might have encountered a new virus - one which
attacks the MBR or something similar.
I don't really want to spend the rest of my life fixing my machines
instead of using them.
Good ideas and suggestions gratefully received.
Kevin.
