Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Youcancatch aglimpse ofthisROMBASIConolderIBMsystems that haveitbydisabling
all the disk drives in the system. In that case, with nothing to boot from, those systems unce-
remoniously dump you into the strange (vintage 1981) ROM BASIC screen.
People used to dread seeing this because it usually meant that the floppy disk or hard disk
they were trying to boot from had become corrupted or had failed. Because no compatible
systems ever had the BASIC interpreter in ROM, they came up with different messages to
display for the same situations in which an IBM system would invoke this BASIC. The most
confusing of these was the message from AMI BIOS, which simply said
NO ROM BASIC -
SYSTEM HALTED
, which really meant that the system was incapable of booting.
With no valid MBR or bootable device found, some IBM systems display a screen using
text graphic characters that look similar to
Figure 5.11
.
Figure 5.11
IBM ROM BIOS display indicating an invalid master boot record.
The meaning here is, “Insert a bootable floppy disk into the A: drive and press the F1
key.”
AMI BIOS Messages
WithnovalidMBRorbootabledevicefound,systemswithanAMIBIOSdisplaythefol-
lowing message:
NO ROM BASIC - SYSTEM HALTED
This message is confusing to some because it seems to point to a problem with ROM
BASIC, which of course is not what it really means! The AMI ROM does not include a
BASIC interpreter in the ROM (neither does any other ROMs except those found in very
old IBM machines), so instead of jumping into BASIC or displaying a useful message in-
dicating there are no bootable devices, it displays this confusing message. The real mean-
ing is the same as for all these messages, which is to say that none of the bootable devices
