You guys were both right.  The hard drive was not partitioned or
formatted, AND I had a bad floppy cable.  I replaced the floppy cable and
partitioned and formatted the hard drive and all is well.  (As well as can
be expected anyways!)  Thanks for the help guys!

J

Bill Cohane wrote:

> 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]>

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