Raising MS-DOS from the death

This week I had the 'pleasure' of reviving an old MS-DOS system.

First of all, the only backup I had was under Linux, so I wanted both
Linux and MS-DOS to boot. I threw in a simple IDE disk and let the
bios detect it and set it up.

Linux is fine with that. MS-DOS isn't.

I formatted a primary partition on it under MS-DOS 6.22, restored
the MS-DOS backup via Linux, booted MS-DOS and it came up with a
corrupted C:. Read something about FORMAT of MS-DOS 6.22 being
weird, zero-ed out the first block of the partition, formatted it again
with FORMAT of MS-DOS 6.22, booted. Corrupted C:.

Got annoyed, this was costing me serious time (once, ages ago, this
Pentium-90 was 'blazingly fast'. But even Linux catches up.)

The fix was to setup the disk correctly in the BIOS. 'Normal' mode worked
a lot better. Used 'SYS C:' to restore MS-DOS 6.22 once more without
reformatting, made sure with SCANDISK that my data was there again and
readable.

Getting an IDE cd-rom to work under MS-DOS is easy, once you get the
drivers for ide cd-rom under MS-DOS.