🚀 go-pugleaf

From article <trung.726508956@sundance>, by trung@sundance.SJSU.EDU (Trung Tran):
>>> rubin@procon.jhuapl.edu (Don Rubin) writes:
>>>
>>> >I have been fooling around with a new motherboard
>>> >and some disks and get the following message when
>>> >I try to boot a 340mb IDE drive
>>>
>>> >NO ROM BASIC
>>> >SYSTEM HALTED
>>>
>>> You may not have the boot partition active.  Hookup the drive and run fdisk
>>> off
>>> floppy, and check the partition status.
> 
>>I had this message pop up regularly after about 3 years' of almost
>>round-the-clock usage of a Taiwanese clone computer.  My dealer said
>>indicated a motherboard problem.  I suspected my system was overheating from
>>too much use, and since I began turning it off a few hours a day to let it
>>cool, the problem has disappeared.  In any case, the problem certainly was
>>not related to anything having to do with my boot partition or hard disk, at
>>least not with my system.
> 
> Well, I just saw this on my 486-50 last night.  I'm not really sure about
> the heat-related theory.  It happened to me when I just got home from work.
> I turned on the PC and there it was.  After a cold reboot, it disappeared.
> I'm pretty sure this was the first time I saw it.  Even if it was
> heat-related, I installed a CPU cooler (a small fan mounted on a heat-sink)
> for my 486 to prevent it from getting fried.
> 
> Anyhow, anyone else has any comment?

Yes.  I have had a similar problem on my 386-40 before.  It has only happened
twice that I recall, and both times were upon a program losing it's cookies
running in the Windows 3.1 environment!  I have not been able to duplicate
the error, but it seems to be some catastrophic error (bad op-code or the
CPU gets confused/out of sync with some support circuitry) that causes
the entire system to come crashing to a halt.  Older computers used to have
a basic interpreter built into ROM (before everyone was assumed to have a 
disk drive installed), so when it can't find that to fall back in to, it just
halts.  Just one of those things, I guess.
:)

-Jason