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From: mark@vehka.uta.fi (Marko Jauhiainen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: NO ROM BASIC, SYSTEM HALTED (Help !)
Summary: Got it fixed, thanks !!
Message-ID: <1472@kielo.uta.fi>
Date: 23 Jul 90 06:44:48 GMT
References: <1433@kielo.uta.fi>
Sender: news@uta.fi
Reply-To: mark@vehka.uta.fi (Marko Jauhiainen)
Organization: University of Tampere, Finland
Lines: 35


	
	Thanks to everyone who responded to my question about ROM BASIC and
the problem I had. In case I wasn't the only one who did not know it, here is
the story in short:
	The BIOS tries to find a disk with a boot block; first it searches
floppy and then hard disk. If it cannot find the boot block, it searches
for the ROM BASIC (loaded immediately above the BIOS), which original IBM's 
have but most clones don't. At this point, if no ROM BASIC is found, the system
is halted :(

	What I had to do to make things work on my computer was to run FDISK 
and make one of my hard disk partitions active. Then I checked and double-
checked my floppy drive cables and got it working, too. I also removed the
extra data cable ( for drive D:) from the controller board but I am not sure
it affected anything.

	As to my other question, a high-level format can be done to each
partition separately but a low-level format treats everything as one big disk.
I kinda knew it but I wasn't in a mood to experiment ( when things start going
wrong everything can happen ;-).

	Thanks,

		Mark





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 Marko Jauhiainen, Dept. of Computer Science |   Don't talk unless you can
 University of Tampere, Finland              |     improve the silence.
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