Hard Drives

Tuesday, May 20th, 2003

On days like this one, here in Idaho, when the temperatures are in the low eighties and gentle breezes blow across the valley, it is difficult to turn my attention to computers.  I think I would rather be out with my sons and a fishing rod, hooking trout out of a local stream.  Sitting here in my office with the breeze rustling into the room, let us look at another issue commonly encountered by PC users. 

NO ROM BASIC… SYSTEM HALTED
I cannot tell you how many times I have seen this appear instead of the usual Starting MS Dos…  or   Starting MS Win95…    so what causes this problem and how do we solve it? 

In years gone by, before the advent of Windows98, Windows95, Windows period, all the way back to the original IBM Personal Computers, the precursors to today’s PCs, at one time called “clones,” IBM had a Basic Interpreter that resided in the BIOS or ROM.  If the system upon boot could not find a floppy disk or hard drive to boot, it would load this Rom Basic Interpreter.
 

Today, we do not see this message from the current version of BIOS installed on the motherboard.  You will see a message such as:

• SYSTEM DISK NOT FOUND
• INSERT DISK and HIT ANY KEY 

These are all symptoms of the same issue, the computer cannot something to use to boot the computer, or the next step after it has finished the POST process.

Solutions

Early computers would give you the NO ROM BASIC message if you had a drive configuration problem, such as no hard drive or floppy drive(s) were installed.  It was rather primitive by today’s standards.  The first thing you need to consider was your floppy drive or hard drive was not connected into the system properly.  That issues resolved, then you did not have a bootable partition on either the floppy disk or your hard drive.  These issues still exist with today’s computers.

For our discussion here, we will assume your hardware is installed correctly, ribbon data cables properly installed, power cable installed and the CMOS has been configured to recognize the drives. 

Floppy Disks
If your BIOS has been properly configured to boot from a floppy:     Boot sequence =  A-C

Then the issue is your floppy disk.  

• The disk maybe bad, areas of the floppy disk cannot be read by your drive – Time to make a new boot floppy disk and toss out the old one.
• The floppy does not have a bootable partition installed, most properly termed as:  a Boot Disk

Hard Drives

• The hard drive does not have a partition, partition your hard drive
• The partition on the hard drive is not set “ACTIVE.”  Use fdisk to set the C drive’s partition to active
• The hard drive has not been properly formatted.  Use the Boot disk to format the drive with this command:   format c: /s (the /s switch transfers the system files to the hard drive, making it bootable
• The hard drive does not contain any system files or boot files.  Use your boot floppy to add the files to the hard drive using this command:  sys c:   this transfers the boot files or system files to the hard drive.

How to partition a hard drive (Win95/98)

• Insert your Windows95/98 Startup Disk (or DOS 6 boot disk) in the A: Drive. Turn on the computer with the floppy disk drive in the A: drive.
• When the computer has finished booting you should be at the A: Prompt. (If your computer still boots to the C: drive or continues to load into Windows then you make sure the boot sequence of the computers BIOS is set to boot from the floppy drive first.)
• From the A: prompt type FDISK [Enter]
• If you have a hard drive larger than 512MB then FDISK displays the following message: (assuming that you booted using the Windows95/98 Startup Disk)
• Your computer has a disk larger than 512 MB. This version of Windows includes improved support for large disks, resulting in more efficient use of disk space on large drives, and allowing disks over 2 GB to be formatted as a single drive.

IMPORTANT: If you enable large disk support and create any new drives on this disk, you will not be able to access the new drive(s) using other operating systems, including some versions of Windows 95 and Windows NT, as well as earlier versions of Windows and MS-DOS. In addition, disk utilities that were not designed explicitly for the FAT32 file system will not be able to work with this disk. If  you need to access this disk with other operating systems or older disk utilities, do not enable large drive support.

Do you wish to enable large disk support (Y/N)….?   [Y]

Answering Yes [Y] Allows you to to setup the hard drive using one single partiton utilizing the full size of the hard drive without having to split the drive into 2 or 3 partitions. Answering No [N] The largest partition that you can create is 2 GB.

Windows95/98 FDISK then displays:

• Microsoft Windows 98 Fixed Disk Setup Program (C)Copyright Microsoft Corp. 1983 - 1998
• FDISK Options
• Current fixed disk drive: 1
• Choose one of the following:

1. Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive
2. Set active partition
3. Delete partition or Logical DOS Drive
4. Display partition information
5. Change current fixed disk drive

Enter choice: [1]

 

If you started the computer using MSDOS V6 then FDISK displays: MS-DOS Version 6.00 Fixed Disk Setup Program (C) Copyright Microsoft Corp. 1993

 

FDISK Options:   Current fixed disk drive: 1  

Choose one of the following:  

1. Create DOS partitions or Logical DOS Drive
2. Set active partition
3. Delete partition or Logical DOS Drive
4. Display partition information

Enter Choice: [1] Press ESC to exit FDISK

 

If your installing the hard drive for the first time or there is no exsisting partition on the hard drive then you must create the Primary partition. (This is the partition that the computer will boot to) Choose 1, and the following screen will come up:

Windows95/98 FDISK displays:

Create DOS Partition or Logical DOS Drive
Current fixed disk drive: 1

  Choose one of the following:  

1. Create Primary DOS Partition
2. Create Extended DOS Partition
3. Create Logical DOS Drive(s) in the Extended DOS Partition

  Enter choice: [1]  

 

MSDOS 6 FDISK displays:

Create DOS Partition
Current Fixed Drive: 1

1. Create Primary DOS partition
2. Create Extended DOS partition
3. Create logical DOS drive(s) in the Extended DOS partition

 

Enter choice: [1]
Press ESC to return to FDISK Options

 

The default choice is [1] press [ENTER]

FDISK will ask:

Do you if you want to partition the full size of the drive? [Y} Press [ENTER]

 

When the partition is created press [ESCAPE] and exit FDISK.

Now you must format the hard drive. From the A: prompt type: format C: /S [ENTER] ( A:\>format C: /s )

Format should display: WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE DISK DRIVE C: WILL BE LOST!

Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Type [Y} {ENTER}

Your screen should display the following: Formatting 769.75M (If you have a 750Mb drive, Your actual drive size will differ) 1 percent completed.

  Format complete. System transferred

Volume label (11 characters, ENTER for none)? Press[ENTER]

  806,912,000 bytes total disk space 344,064 bytes used by system 806,567,936 bytes available on disk 16,384 bytes in each allocation unit. 49,229 allocation units available on disk. Volume Serial Number is 156D-1CF5

  Partitioning and formatting the hard drive is completed.

Special Acknowledgements to contributors to this article:
Bill Cohane and Don Gray

Tech Tip of the Week

You have decided to add another hard drive, CD rom drive, or any other device requiring a power souce, only to find you have no more power connectors.  Now what do you do? You add a simple power splitter to an existing power cable. This is a common item you can find at any computer supply store or on the Internet.  Typically, this small item will cost under a dollar (US) and creates no issues for your system.  Have fun Bob Wright