POST error

A friend of mine has the following problem with an older Compaq Presario. He was in the process of restoring data to a hard drive when the system crashed. For some reason he then removed and replaced the CMOS battery. Now when he boots he gets a 163 error – invalid date and time message followed by two choices, F1 to boot or F10 to run setup. Both or these choices return the message “Bad or missing command interpreter”. Can’t boot from a floppy because it never gets that far.

Compaq’s support forum suggests that the ROM chip has gone bad.

Any ideas?