I have an old 90 MHz Pentium machine that will not boot. (It was given to me by a friend already broken, so my knowledge about this computer is limited to what I can see.)
When I turn it on, it gets past the memory check and hard drive identification. Then it stops, saying:
A: Drive Error
Press F1 to RESUME
If I press F1, it goes to the next screen (the chart showing the components of the system), then pauses for a while, then flashes to another screen saying (in text much larger and wider than standard DOS text):
NO ROM BASIC
SYSTEM HALTED( _ )
(That?s a flashing underscore/text insertion point that I put in parentheses)
This is where I am completely stuck. I have experimented with some settings in the BIOS (which, by the way, has an interface similar to ancient version of Windows (before 3.1), but that did not help. What I did was turn off the option to check for a floppy disk at startup, and I also set the order in which to look for a boot disk from A:,C: to C:, A:.
When I restarted I did not get the ?A: Drive Error?? message, and I did not get a pause at the second startup screen before going into the ?NO ROM?? message. (The second startup screen was displayed for less than 1 second before the ?NO ROM?? screen displayed.) I then went back into the BIOS and set it back to normal.
Other things I have tried are booting with a Windows 95 startup disk (this had no effect whatsoever), and I tried booting with another hard drive. One thingI noticed when looking inside the computer was that there appeared to be no jumper setting on the floppy drive (meaning there was a place where jumpers could be set, but the little, black jumper setter was not on them).
If anyone can help me getthis computer back into working order, I would greatly appreciate it!
