Ah, I got the P166 to boot to DOS 3.3 on the RLL drive. The machine saw the drive as the primary master once I disabled its onboard IDE controllers. But with the controllers enabled, it would not boot at all. No matter how I look at it, the RLL drive must run without any other drives attached.

I'm actually giving up on this because the recovery effort would never work. On the 37 meg drive, there's only 1.5 meg of free space. The chance that a deleted old version of the 1 meg document is on that 1.5 meg is essentially impossible. No sense in me conjuring a Pentium to boot to Windows with an RLL drive ISA controller attached, only to find that the free space contains Word Perfect temporary files. The fragmentation alone makes this impossible.

Maybe the file got corrupt because the machine ran out of hard drive space while working on it. Still, it's pretty harsh to turn 760k of a 1meg file into 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.

Thanks for your input. This machine is going back to its owner.