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System Halted No ROM BASIC *after* CONFIG.SYS Loads

mbbrutman said:
I'd clean the floppy drive heads and rails and try a different diskette.
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I re-read the thread and I can't see where he's booting from floppy. But then, there's not a lot of detail that's been offered by the OP.

I'd have thought that using a different floppy (if one were booting from floppy) would be the first thing that anyone would try. Perhaps my problem is that I'm assuming that the OP has had experience with older equipment.

Even if you're booting from floppy, a corrupted MBR on the hard drive will sometimes lead to strange and wonderful behavior. But I thought the OP had indicated that the error was encountered only when using EMM386.

Maybe I need a summary of what's going on...
 
That's how I read it too Chuck. Running PC Dos 7 rev 1 off the hdd. Tried Ramboost but that hung the system, so then tried the manual route using himem and emm386. Emm386 hung the system. Removing it from the config.sys the system booted fine.

I'd be trying NOEMS first out just of curiousty. Nice little KB article about emm386- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/77083

Pertinent point as you and trixter mentioned is hardware conflicts. Of course there's no switches in the OPs set up as yet so adding some may well help. Kinda reverse of what is mentioned below-

"If your computer fails when you start it, the memory range you specified for EMM386 is probably being used by hardware or video display drivers. In that case, insert your startup disk in drive A and restart your computer. Then, edit your CONFIG.SYS and remove the I switch(es) you added to the DEVICE command for EMM386. DO NOT Contact Microsoft Support Services for further assistance."

Is PAUSE.SYS the culprit?
 
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My bad on not realizing that it was a boot from a hard drive, but it's the same problem - DOS does not handle read errors well during booting. If you have a failure before COMMAND.COM is loaded there is no attempt to retry apart from what the drive does internally.

So let me amend the suggestion - boot from a floppy and try a hard drive utility that can scan every LBA for bad sectors. I'm going to bet that there are some bad sectors toward the lower numbered LBAs. (You might be able to use SYS or copy COMMAND.COM over the bad existing version to get around it.)

BTW: Loading a bad device driver that interferes with the operation of the controller would have the same side effect. Reads would start to look "bad" and during the boot stage things are sensitive. So maybe it is a conflict, but it will be a conflict with the HDD controller...
 
It's also possible that EMM386 allocated an area for DMA that doesn't work for this particular motherboard/configuration. That would also cause failures.

So for me, the first thing is to comment out the EMM386 CONFIG.SYS line and see if the machine boots. Try running EMM386 from a command line to see if there's anything funky with the executable file. Then put EMM386 back into the CONFIG.SYS file, but with OFF specified on the command line, then AUTO, then finally ON--all the time with the VERBOSE switch.
 
This has some description on stepping through your config.sys/autoexec.bat. I wasn't sure when it got introduced or what newer features were added, this article implies dos 6.x introduced the step through (F8 to ask you on each thing which you can then troubleshoot yourself which command is hanging your system) or F5 automatically skips it all. I guess I was remembering holding ctrl down to bypass it all, shift I believe was used in Windows 9x instead. Similarly shift in a Windows environment is used to bypass the startup folder or autorun features but that's not on topic here, just me justifying my mistaken memory ;-)
 
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I was just testing everyone. Good job Cal, you won. ;-) link fixed. I often forget to close my " in url links.
 
Lol I did hold out for a bit thinking someone else would point it out. the OP is using PC Dos 2k so i'm unsure if it has a similar function. Wanting to find out more of what RAMboost does I found a link to the PC Dos 7 user guide http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/pc/dos/83G9260_IBM_PC_DOS_7.0_Users_Guide_Jan95.pdf It might be useful to some members. 625 pages for your viewing pleasure.

Hopefully the OP will provide some test results to the suggestions made.
 
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The system boots just fine from a floppy. That's how I set the system up: I use Partition Magic 8 from boot floppies (Cladera DOS) to set up the hard drive. So yes, I did boot from a floppy disk.

PAUSE.SYS is a utility I have used since the 80's to stop the CONFIG.SYS so I can read messages on the screen that relate to items booted in the CONFIG.SYS. Once the CONFIG.SYS is stable it's commented out. Very usefull utility.

So far I've had no luck getting EMM386 to work. I've tried NOEMS & Verbose to no avail. At this point I just run it without any memory management. I have 556K free which is more than enough for what I use it for - copying 5.25" floppies to 3.5" floppies as needed. My main DOS workstation is a FIC VA-503+ with a 500 MHz K6-2 with 128 MB RAM. And I have it tuned very well.

Thanks to all for you help here.
 
barythrin said:
This has some description on stepping through your config.sys/autoexec.bat. I wasn't sure when it got introduced or what newer features were added, this article implies dos 6.x introduced the step through (F8 to ask you on each thing which you can then troubleshoot yourself which command is hanging your system) or F5 automatically skips it all. I guess I was remembering holding ctrl down to bypass it all, shift I believe was used in Windows 9x instead. Similarly shift in a Windows environment is used to bypass the startup folder or autorun features but that's not on topic here, just me justifying my mistaken memory ;-)
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That was a nice feature. FWIW, I have a boxed sets of DR-DOS 5.0/6.0 and IIRC, 6.0 lets you step through the CONFIG & AUTOEXEC line-by-line. Not too many play with DR-DOS anymore which is too bad, as I always thought it had a lot of nice features for its time.
 
Agent Orange said:
That was a nice feature. FWIW, I have a boxed sets of DR-DOS 5.0/6.0 and IIRC, 6.0 lets you step through the CONFIG & AUTOEXEC line-by-line. Not too many play with DR-DOS anymore which is too bad, as I always thought it had a lot of nice features for its time.
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DR-Dos prompted MS to include similar features. But you're right though it is a pity it's not mentioned much these days. Maybe it there should be dedicated thread for it just for old times sake. Possibly testing compatibility of mTCP and other cool software made by VCF members
 
Chuck(G) said:
Just for giggles, have you tried booting DOS 6.22 with EMM386 on this system? (Forgive me if the question has been asked--I'm lazy today).
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Well just for giggles, I'll answer you - 10 years later. Sorry I missed it.

I did not try it with DOS 6.22 as I don't have a copy. I do not remember if I tried it with PC-DOS 7R1. The computer still works but I have not had to make/copy a 5.25" disk in 5 years or so.

In 1999 I bought a copy of IBM PC-DOS 7 Revision 1 (PC-DOS7R1) and that is all that I use. My claim to fame is that I made IBM fix a bug in PC-DOS7R1 10 days before the support period expired. It was the last bug in PC-DOS7R1 that they fixed and I was the only user that got the fix. It's a very,very,very esoteric hardware issue that would affect maybe 2 persons out of say, 30,000 to 60,000 users. But kudos to IBM for doing it and I have used their DOS exclusively ever since.
 
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