No ROM basic system haulted?

[N2deep]

I'm working on an old PC for a friend of mine and I formated his hard drive useing My pc. when I installed the hard drive back to his computer I noticed when i boot up without a system diskette in the floppy drive I get this error "No ROM Basic System Haulted"

Any Idea's ? I think mabe his Motherboard Is Fried, mabe that was the Problem from the begining......

[Mntsnow]

That because you FORMATTED the drive! YOu have to have an OPERATING SYSTEM or system files for a hard drive to be bootable! when you format a harddrive do so with the /s switch so you end up with a bootable harddrive!

Mntsnow

ps. you will also have to run FDISK when it is in the computer that is going to use it and set the primary partition ACTIVE!

[N2deep]

No, I guess i diden't explain it well enough. The Problem was not with the format, it began before I formated it. The error msg you get with a harddrive with no operating system is "Non system disk error".
I think this may have to do with the ROM on motherboard, I've never seen this error msg before. "No ROM basic system haulted" ROM: Read Only Memory, that is on the motherboard. I think It may have been fried by a lightning strike or some sort or power serge.

[This message has been edited by N2deep (edited 09-12-99).]

[Mntsnow]

Ohhh...well I got my idea from your when I installed the hard drive back to his computer I noticed when i boot up without a system diskette in the floppy drive

Yes now that you have further explained it it just might be a toasted mobo /forum/frown.gif

Mntsnow

[CMonster]

It means that there is a problem with the hard drive or hard drive controller; since the drive could be accessed in another system then it is probably the I/O controller.

Does the drive plug into an I/O controller card or directly into the motherboard? It may be possible just to stick a $14 controller card in there and keep on trucking.

You are sure you set the correct drive cylinders/heads/sectors and stuff in the CMOS??

[This message has been edited by CMonster (edited 09-13-99).]

[Susan]

ROM Basic is a version of MS Basic that was built into a ROM chip on early PC's.

Some present day PC's display that same error message if turned on with no disk drives attached.

Double check your connections, BIOS settings and try changing the cable.

[steves]

Hi all - back again after a while off.

Can you access the HD when booting from a floppy? I had an old XT that started to get unreliable booting from it's MFM drive. But you could always access the HD afterwards, so I ran it of a boot floppy until I skipped it.

The boot floppy contained a config.sys and drivers, the autexec simply switched to drive c: and ran the autoexec from there.

Steve

P.S. Spot on susan

[Monolith]

The problem is due to the fact that, when you formatted your friend's, you used the fdisk utility first. Since you can only have one active primary partition, you could not assign your friend's hard drive as active. You need to run the fdisk again and make it an active partition.
Tip: you might want to copy cab files to your friend's hard drive and install from there if you encouter further problems.

[LazMan]

All of you are partially right and wrong. I've been working on computers since way back in the day when we had to punch cards and there were no monitors - we played 'Star Trek' on ascii teletype across what was the origins of the internet in the mid-70s (that Al Gore invented, so he says)!

Anyway, back to the original subject: ROM BASIC. The following is exerpted from The original IBM PC, half to have an operating system built in, half to satisfy contractual obligations with Microsoft, had a version of BASIC "burnt" into a ROM chip. If no boot disk was inserted in a floppy drive at system startup, BASIC would load from the ROM. To keep on the good side of Bill Gates's attorneys, Big Blue kept this ROM BASIC in the XT, AT, and even into the PS2 line.

The clone makers, to retain compatibility, kept similar error catching routine in their BIOSes. If no boot files are detected on the hard drive, the NO ROM BASIC error message is displayed in big blocky, really shocking, letters.

This is often good news, in a way. When you see this message, you are reassured the system recognizes the hard drive, so it is not likely to be a drive crash, or other hardware catastrophe. Generally, the cause is either that the system files have been erased or corrupted. The other common reason is that the hard drive has been defined improperly in the CMOS SETUP. Investigate the second possibility first. If you start reading and writing to a badly configured hard drive, you'll louse your data up really bad!

Try booting from a floppy. If you use any drive compression utilities, then you need the proper rescue disk. If you can get to the C drive, and all your data is recognizable, TEST FOR VIRUSES!

If the virus test is negative, try FDISK /MBR from the A: prompt. You'll have to have the FDISK program (it's part of DOS) on the boot floppy. This re-writes the master boot record. If that does not help, then run FDISK. IF YOU'VE GOT ANY DATA ON THE HARD DRIVE THAT YOU HOPE TO RECOVER, AT THIS POINT, MAKE NO CHANGES IN THE PARTITION SIZE!!! CHANGING THE SIZE OF A PARTITION DESTROYS ALL THE DATA!!! DELETING ANY PARTITIONS WILL DESTROY ALL DATA IN THOSE PARTITIONS!!! For now, go to PARTITION INFORMATION. Look to see if the first (probably the only) partition on your fixed disk is defined as a DOS partition and is set as ACTIVE. If it's not ACTIVE, then switch it to ACTIVE in FDISK. If it's NOT defined as a DOS partition, try the following suggestions, but your situation is starting to look grim.

Try running NORTON DISK DOCTOR or the DOS SCANDISK from a DOS Disk to look for any scrambled sectors. If this does not show any house of horrors, you will need to use NORTON DISKTOOL or the DOS SYS command to re-create the bootup system files. You can run DISKTOOL from your hard drive. SYS must be run from the whatever floppy you used to boot up with. DISKTOOL will do the trick in some cases where SYS fails. On an older drive, MFM or RLL, try NORTON's CALIBRAT to "tune-up" the drive. The last resort, in any case, is a low level format. For the MFM and RLL drives, you can use DISK MANAGER. HARD DRIVE DIAGNOSTICS is a shareware collection of utilities for older hard drives. HARD DRIVE DIAGNOSTICS will do low level formatting on MFM and RLL drives. For IDE units, a low level format program is built into most newer motherboards. SCSI adapters generally contain a low level formatting utility. After a low level format, except with DISK MANAGER, you will have to run FDISK and then FORMAT /s.

If the computer still will not boot, YOUR DRIVE IS HOSED!

GOOD LUCK!

/forum/smile.gif

Laz


[This message has been edited by LazMan (edited 09-21-99).]