Thank you Tinstaffl
Yes, I could see that it was looking for an installed OS - what I couldn't understand was why it failed to see W98 on two of the tested HDs or the standard W98 on the two different W98 boot floppies or the Disk Genius DR DOS boot floppy or, finally the Ontrack Rescue disk!!! ???
I finally managed to make an initial chink of access courtesy of a response to another thread which touted the usefulness of Knoppix, the Linux distro which runs off the CD. This booted quite nicely, let me have a look at the drives and (tonight) has got the drive Fdisk'ed and formatted and W98 installed.
As I've mentioned before, it's rather ironic that when Redmond's finest go walkabout, it's Linux to the rescue!!
So, with fingers tightly crossed the 'new' machine MAY be on its way to becoming operational
- however, I still have no idea what those 'Geek Speak' messages were all about and the other two machines are still as useful as the proverbial motorcycle ashtray!
Such are the joys of 'pooterism'