Thanks for your reply!
What I ended up doing (before I read your post) is a dual boot with Win98, and that was fine. That's not what I ideally wanted, but it is fine. Now I'm on to the next set of challenges
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Please forgive my ignorance. What is sys afresh?
I too came to the conclusion that the MBR must be corrupt, so applied fdisk /mbr, but that is as far as I took it.