Cannot Load DOS/Batch Files Nested to Deep

[LadyGrey]

This looks like the right place to post a question/problem I've come up against just in the last week on two different computers. I really have very few specs.
These are both older computers, donated to Arc. One had a 900Mhz AMD, K7VMM Ver.1.2a mobo I believe, 384MB RAM, running Win ME. The other was a Dell 210 workstation, 500MHz Intel I believe, 512MB RAM, running Win98, no idea of the motherboard. As I said both are old computers.
Both have Quantum Fireball Maxtor HDDs. Both are 10gig.
On each I have tried to run Maxblast 4 as I have for countless others that I have worked on to zero the drives and start fresh with an install of 98SE that is needed for the programs that we use at Arc. In the first instance with the 900Mhz AMD the program started to run just like always then stopped with the message "Cannot Load DOS" "Batch Files Nested to Deeply". I tried again and this time the floppy drive refused to even work.
So I got 4 other floppy drives and 4 other cables and proceeded to switch around cables and drives all with no success. I then decided that maybe if I pulled the CMOS battery and moved the jumper to clear everything that might help. Long story short it did and I was then able to use the floppy drive again and Max Blast 4 ran and I was able to zero the drive with no more trouble.
Question: WHY did this happen. I found the fix but I want to know WHY it happened in the first place. Could it be the actual battery itself?
The next one the Dell did the same thing, "Cannot Load DOS" but no mention of Batch Files,only this time there was an A: prompt so I used FDisk and deleted the partition and then made a new one and that solved that problem.
Again, WHY?
I thought maybe my floppy disk had gone bad, so I downloaded new programs and used new disks but that didn't help either and at the end the old disk worked just fine in both computers. Just something I haven't ever come across before and I'm curious as to why it happened.
Thanks,
LG

[david eaton]

both older computers,

Probably the battery was nearly dead or dying anyway. Replace the battery as a matter of course.