I never tried to boot without a Ram card installed.
It's worth a try, but 16K isn't much to work with,
at least since DOS 2.0. :-)

Once my disk drive settings were wiped out and I
had to get some numbers off the back of the HDD and
reconfigure so the machine could access it. Not sure
if there were some dip switches involved.

Google "low-level format hard disk". Perhaps there are
some descriptions of symptoms of this potential problem.

BJinNJ