Assuming you had a bootable disk in A:, the system bios may have been
configured to boot from C: first or only.  If so, since it had no system
partition, the boot halted.  Could also be you have a bad or mis-ID'd floppy
drive.  That era system sometimes would default to assuming the floppy drive
was 5 1/4".

James A. Frey wrote:

> I am working on a 386 dinosaur and wanted to reformat the hard drive
> after deleting the old partition, I went to reboot to (hopefully)
> format, when halfway through the boot process I get a blank screen that
> says:  NO ROM BASIC
>                                                            SYSTEM HALTED
>
> Does anyone know what this means, and how to get around it?  The system
> was working fine before all this, I just wanted to do a clean install of
> DOS and Windows 3.1.  Any help would be appreciated.  TIA
>
> James
>
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