On 26 Jun 2001, at 17:30, Robert Graf wrote:

> 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.

  On an IBM PC -- and, for all I know, this may be true of even IBM's
recent models -- there is a second ROM chip containing a cut-down
version of BASIC.  If the ROM BIOS cannot find a bootable device, it
will attempt to pass control to this second ROM.

  Many of the third-party ROM BIOSes duplicate this behaviour, even
though nobody but IBM has ever released a macine with such a second
ROM installed.  Even if IBM no longer supplies this ROM, there's no
pressing reason for BIOS makers to rush to modify this code which has
been stable for close to 20 years now.

  So all this message tells us is that the BIOS found no bootable
devices.  We cannot really infer anything about the type of CPU or
age of the machine.

David Gillett

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