At 01:21 PM 9/20/98 -0400, you 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...

In the original "IBM PC" days, if there was no bootable floppy present
and no bootable partition was found on the hard drive (if there
even was a hard drive), the Basic Interpreter that resided in ROM
would load and appear on the screen. Then clones came out that did
not have a license from Microsoft to include Basic in the ROM and
this "NO ROM BASIC" would appear if no bootable disk was detected.
(Also, somewhere along the line, I imagine that Basic migrated to
disk and was left out of system ROMs.) Soon after that, less cryptic
messages like "system disk not found...insert disk and hit any key"
appeared.

So your computer couldn't find a bootable disk, looked in ROM for
Basic, couldn't find that, and sent you a standard (although
cryptic) message.

As Don Gray wrote, the most common problem is that your hard disk's
primary partition is not marked active (i.e., bootable). Another
thing to check for is to see if your primary partition contains
valid system boot files. (If not, you can "Sys" the hard disk from
the DOS system diskette, or reformat it with the S switch.) Also,
you might not have a primary partition at all (it's possible
to have only an extended partition). Or maybe your hard disk
is not functioning. (Boot to floppy and see if you can access
the hard disk.)

Regards,
Bill

                                  -----
       **Need help with PCBUILD mailing list? Send an Email to:**
        Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]> or Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>