Hello Folks,

Mom has a 486 that crashed when my brother was installing Myst
(unfortunately our Christmas present to him).

Anyways I had installed a bios upgrade card to support >540 meg hardrives
and it was not reading the paramters from the drive.  The mb has a built
in hd controller.

I put in a different hd that did not require the bios card and it got
past the hd controller error.  It also got past that point with the bios
card, so it seemed as though the controller and the bios card were ok.

I did put the old drive back in and it sounds like it tries and then
powers down.  Doesn't work in any way, even with disabling the onboard
controller and putting a new controller in a slot.  I am sure the drive
is toasted.

The error I got now was:
NO ROM BASIC
SYSTEM HALTED

Doesn't sound good.  If I put in a ms-dos install disk it will go through
and install dos (slowly).  When I remove the disk and reboot I get the
same message and there does not appear to be ant dos directory if I boot
to A: and do a dir on C: .

So does it appear to you folks as though the mb (or at least the rom) is
gone?  Can the rom be replaced or fixed?

If I do need a new mb, does anyone know a good place to get one for a
486?  They seem hard to come by these days.  I would like to be able to
get the system running again, even if I only use it for a Linux box.

TIA,
Dan Huston


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