Thank you both ( Ron & JPS Hurricane) for your invaluable insights.--I always do "what if" questions in life and rarely get answer--haha)

Ron, I too figured if I removed a drive  then that would wig out the booting sequence.
I plan for that machine to yes create  windows 2000 on a separate HD and just toggle as needed from the bios.  First I shall pu my formatted  blank HD in there to see if the bios would even consider booting to it before I actually  install the software.
On a different tower, I will  try doing that as D: and see what I get on that.
I have found the 98 has been the most stable for me to use--I still have my dos 486 with win 3.11.  As I mentioned an old database from BBS days blew up windows 2000 printer drivers.
The plan was to use win 2000 if I am dealing with USB flash  drives that do not have the  win 98 drivers, and I can get a higher converter for the docx documents if I am on windows 2000.
The ones for 98   I think stop near office 2003 documents.  As for cloud stuff, really do not like that--try to keep everything self contained on  external storage (floppy/zips and a few flash drives.  

At work I deal with the more modern  win  xp, and 7--but still use the 98 whenever possible :-)


                                          
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