Turbodos on a Horizon 8/16 system

[Jim Battle]

This email is short on questions; just a vintage computer putzing 
report.  I do have one question of opinion at the end.

I've had a northstar horizon 8/16 system for a year and a half now, but 
I was able to finally get everything together and a bit of time to get 
it running.

The 8/16 is a normal horizon (in the aluminum cabinet, not wooden), with 
a beefier power supply.  There may be some other mechanical differences, 
such as many more punchouts in the back.  The purpose of the system is 
to host multiple CPUs running in a S-100 backplane, each with its own 
local memory, using the Z80 down on the motherboard to act as a server 
for the shared resources.  As the 8/16 name implies, you can have 8b 
(z80) or 16b (8086) CPUs, or a mix of them.  Mine has two Z80 cards, 
each with 64KB DRAM, in addition to the Z80 on the motherboard and 64KB 
DRAM that is uses on the S-100 BUS.

The box has a single 5.25" floppy and a 30 MB Rodime hard drive (ST506 
type interface).  The way things are set up in the horizon, you can't 
boot directly off the hard drive; the usual procedure is to boot the 
floppy, and the floppy contains a bootstrap to load the OS from the hard 
disk.

I first booted into HDOS from floppy, the hard disk version of NSDOS. 
It has both non-destructive and destructive disk tests.  "LI" shows that 
there is no meaningful HDOS file system on the drive.

Next, I ran only the non-destructive test since one goal is to see what 
is on the hard disk.  HDOS, like NSDOS, has a command for reading 
arbitrary absolute sectors from the floppy, but it isn't supported on 
the hard drive -- instead you can load sectors relative to a named file, 
which doesn't help me here.

Next I booted turbodos from floppy.  "DIR" shows no meaningful file 
system on either of the two partitions on the drive.

Finally, I'm at an impasse.  I assume that this system had *something* 
on the drive, although I suppose a previous owner did a FORMAT on the 
drive before passing the system on.  It would be easiest for me to just 
format the drive and install either HDOS, or more likely, TurboDos and 
get on with it.  If I had more time I'd look into finding a mechanism to 
read the hard drive sector by sector and make a copy, but the reality is 
I have more projects than I have time for, so this seems unlikely.

Does anybody who has read this far have an idea what to do next?  Format 
and reinstall?  Write my own driver to dump the disk first?  Find an old 
PC with a controller card that could interface to the drive?