The beast is in. It is huge and I honestly didn't think it would fit, but it did (NJ). The ginormous cooling fan is really quiet. The PATA dvd burner and floppy drives appear to be working (before, using either made it freeze up). Next step is to connect the old hdd drive and see if that boots. If it does, see if xp works any better (but I think it's damaged), asuming it doesn't, or work well enough, essay a repair install (so I don't have to reinstall drivers & apps). If that fails, reformat the partition and clean install.
I might have found a cause for some of my hdd woes:
http://www.wdc.com/global/products/features/?id=7&language=1
I'd never even heard of this, but apparently after formatting a new sata hdd from xp, you need to run an alignment utility (wich explains why I always get 'partition doesn't align with cylinders' reports in fdisk -l).
The utility probably won't work too well on my existing layout (numerous ntfs & ext4 partitions, though the table was made in xp) and there's a risk nuking the data on it, so I won't try it there.
EDITED: 19 Jul 2015 22:15 by DSMITHHFX