Are you sure that this is actually a 486 machine? The no rom basic warning
would indicate to me that the system is much older, probably pre 286, and it
expected to boot from rom and not from a disk.What is the make and model of
this system? It might have been modified to be able to boot from a drive,
it's hard to say without any more data. Before dos, computers used to boot
from rom and the "operating system" was some variant of basic, usually from
Microsoft. I do recall that Tandy, for one, had some sort of ms-dos based
system that booted from rom and may have had a built in 5.25 floppy. The
floppy might only be a 360k, however. Does the system have any kind of
externally accessible add-in slot that took a cartridge? This is how the old
color computers and the ibm pc junior worked. The color computer used a plug
in disk controller that replaced the basic rom os with another rom of it's
own that supported the disk.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rob Zirk" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 8:54 PM
Subject: Format problem


> I received a 486 from my aunt not too long ago.  It
> was a business computer, so she decided to format the
> hard drive to get rid of confidential company files.
> Unfortunately, she formatted EVERYTHING, so I don't
> even have DOS, Win3x or any OS on there, making the
> computer useless at this point.  All I can do is mess
> around with the BIOS.  Once you leave it to get ready
> to start up, it gives me the message:
>
> No ROM Basic
> System Halted
>
> What my question is, is there a download that I can
> put on a 5 1/4 floppy disk which boots up the computer
> and installs DOS, even with nothing on the system?
> And is there something that would let my 5 1/4" drive
> automatically recognize this "boot disk" and
> automatically have it install DOS?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Rob
>

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