yea if he can hook me up with the configs for both and it resolves everything ill post the this symptom and the outcome into the other thread and close this one. Hopefully I'll soon be past this phase and can move on with the restoration after verifying what does and does not work.
I'm fortunate to have gotten this. I definitely could not have afforded to buy an equivalent machine up and running (especially new), so I will be ecstatic when I know I am good to start cleaning and going through everything.