Thanks for the tip but there is no CMOS battery in this machine. It has 4 AA batteries as it's "back-up" power. And replacing them made no difference.
Anyway .. I did solve the problem and for those that may encounter a similar problem may want to give this a try.
Since I suspected the HD was causing the problem, and I figured I had nothing to loose, I turned the comp off and pulled the ribbon cable off the back of the HD. I left the power connector hooked up. I restarted and, as I expected, I got a HD failure error message. One of the corrective suggestions was to run set-up by pressing F2. That's what I've been looking for. I went into set-up and changed the HD type to the one I got off the HD manufactures website. I also needed to change one of the floppy drive settings as well.
I saved the settings and very carefully plugged the ribbon cable back into the HD. I rebooted and everything came up as if nothing had happened. Now I have some breathing room while I get my older production machines up-graded to newer controls.
TS