The problem is that the Recovery Console version of chkdsk doesn't support the /F option! There is this thing called fixboot, which is supposed to rewrite the boot sector of the disk. But that was, of course, ineffectual.

Looking at the rest of this thread, it seems that there may be a difference between choosing Recover before the install (and working your way down to the Manual Recover option heap) and selecting recover after selecting Install. Is this correct?

For the record, selecting Recover before the install option, then selecting either the Recovery Console, or the "other" option (don't remember its official name, but it eventually lead to the choice between "Fast Recover" and "Manual Recover") and doing the "Manual Recover" thing (which did eventually reinstall just about every DLL and EXE file associated with the system) was completely ineffective.

I did take another hard drive that I had previously put a version of W2K on, and reinstalled W2K on it from the CD on the machine with the new mobo. It seems to boot just fine, thank you. Which leads me to the following question: Could LBA be the culprit here? I don't recall how the old mobo BIOS was set up, but it's entirely possible that I had LBA turned off. On the current mobo, the BIOS has LBA set to Auto (which, according to the pamphlet manual for the mobo, means that LBA is used except for disks "not formatted for it".) Since these drives support it, and I haven't the slightest idea as to how one formats a disk for LBA (or against it, for that matter), it might be that Winduhs is trying to boot using it, but the disk doesn't know what the OS is talking about.

Of course, Knoppix can read (and write) these disks just fine. Which just goes to show: Linux is smarter than Windows. (But you already knew that....)