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How to bring back to life a 1983 Olivetti M24?

What I meant was that the hard drive has a partition but no OS on it, so the BIOS says that. My 486 does the same thing if I put a partitioned, but not bootable hard drive in it. I can't check with my PC-6300 as I don't own a hard drive for it.
 
It's an artifact that moved over when some manufacturers reverse engineered the PC's BIOS. Normally in an IBM if it can't boot from anything it then loads the address that ROM BASIC is burned to on a second set of EPROMS on the motherboard (if you are crafty you can burn a stripped down version of DOS to a set of EPROMS and instead have DOS in ROM). You can find some PC/XT era clone boards that had the extra ROM sockets on the board but the EPROMS were not there because there was no way they could sell the board with unlicensed copies of ROM BASIC, especially from IBM who would sue you out of existance. If these chips are not present the BIOS returns the error you see. I think by the 386 era this feature had been removed from the BIOS.
The nice thing about the M24/PC6300 is that it's a 100% compatible clone to the 5150. A fast one at that.
 
Thank to all of you who have replied to my question regarding the ROM BASIC NOT FOUND error. I tend to agree with Compgeke that the cause of the error is the blank disk.



I found an interesting offer of 25 old diskettes in ebay, and I wonder which of that software will work on MS DOS or PC DOS 3.3.

This is the description of the ebay listing

Auction is for this Mixed Lot of Vintage Games & Software on 5.25 disks for IBM Tandy & Commodore PC. Titles are listed below. These all appear to in excellent condition.

Shultz's Treasure for IBM PC/PCjr.
Math Blaster Plus for IBM & Tandy
Battle Chess Windows for IBM & Tandy & 100% Comp.
Complete Calendar Version 2.4
Mr. Pixel's Cartoon Kit for IBM PC/PCjr
Instant Business Letters
Test Drive IBM PC/XT/AT
Grovers Animals Adventures for IBM & Tandy
Storm Master Tronic for PC & Commodore
Wheel Of Fortune For IBM
Turbo Champions
Sound Blaster Driver Disk #2


I believe that if most of the software on the diskettes are IBM or Tandy compatible, they will be compatible with MS/PC DOS. What do you think?

Furthermore, I am curious if all these games will work on the monochrome display, even if they are meant to be in colour.
 
Also, a quite embarrassing question. My 10 year old cousin to put small pieces of paper inside the floppy drive and a grind was heard from the drive. Of course I removed the paper but I am afraid that it could cause damage to it. Do you think that the piece of paper damaged the floppy disk reader, or the grind was just the motor which rotates the disk?
 
'Georgy Papantoniou' said:
Also, a quite embarrassing question. My 10 year old cousin to put small pieces of paper inside the floppy drive and a grind was heard from the drive. Of course I removed the paper but I am afraid that it could cause damage to it. Do you think that the piece of paper damaged the floppy disk reader, or the grind was just the motor which rotates the disk?
Click to expand...

Shouldn't matter, but you should get all the bits of paper out of the drive! Floppy drives are pretty durable.
 
Back in my teens a girl at school asked me if I could look at her computer, because the floppy drive wasn't accepting disks. Also, she noted there was a bit of a bad smell near the computer. At first I was thinking something burned up and caused the smell, but...

Turns out that someone had inserted a slice of cheese in the drive, which explained both the smell and the inability to insert disks. Very gross, but once I pulled the drive apart and cleaned it out, it worked just fine.

Also if it makes you feel any better, the first questionable thing I did to a computer before I knew better was to delete the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. I then proceeded to use the computer for several hours, making plenty of writes to the disk in the process, rendering any chance of recovery impossible. My grandmother had to rewrite it from scratch according to the computer's documentation.

I'm 33 going on 34, I did this when I was about 11 or 12, and my parents STILL bring it up from time to time. :rolleyes:
 
Everything worked perfectly! Thanks for the help. I managed to install some games too

I have a quite simple question though to make you. Is there any key combination similar to ALT-F4 that will exit any program and return to dos? Because I find it difficult exiting programs and I give up pressing the reset button
 
The procedure to exit back to DOS is different from program to program. There was no common interface for that; each program implemented controls their own way.

There is a memory-resident program you can load that will try to exit any program back to DOS with a keystroke, but I always found it buggy and more trouble than it was worth.
 
When I got my 5150 I started to use IBM BASICA. I was doing fine until it came to exiting to the DOS prompt. I tried the usual suspects for BASIC, such as "bye quit exit..." all to no avail. I actually had to read the manual and find out that it was "system". No, there are no conventions in DOS programs. Some even use function keys, but they're never the same.
 
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