I think clean installation failed, there is/was another installation route with upgrade.
I agree that the low-level explanation is lacking, but in fairness dosbox-x doesn't sound like it offers that (out of the box).
I'm guessing what happened, the boot sector etc. were installed by 98, win2k had some way of converting from FAT32 to NTFS, and the winxp installer just sets some flags and dumps install files on disk somewhere.
Getting all that from "it's the NT conversion" is a stretch, but.
I agree that the low-level explanation is lacking, but in fairness dosbox-x doesn't sound like it offers that (out of the box).
I'm guessing what happened, the boot sector etc. were installed by 98, win2k had some way of converting from FAT32 to NTFS, and the winxp installer just sets some flags and dumps install files on disk somewhere.
Getting all that from "it's the NT conversion" is a stretch, but.