BIOS boot device selection menu

BIOS Questions that don't belong in the other forums. Read them!
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marximus
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Joined: Sun Mar 13, 2005 5:29 am

Hi all, first time in, long time viewer. This site's been great!

Now, on some styles of computers (most notably Acers) one could press F12 while the machine was POSTing, to allow selection of the first boot device. This is really, really, really helpful when in a public environment, the first boot device is the HDD, but on occasion (Ghosting) it's needed to be the floppy (A) drive.

I've never been able to find that functionality on an Award BIOS based machine - except - one night, I was cleaning the keyboard of a PC which was booting and, to my amazement, there was that boot device menu.

For the life of me, I didn't know which key or key combo I pressed to bring that menu up.

In general, does the Award BIOS support boot device selection menu, and what key combination is it???!??!

Mark Borchers
KachiWachi
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Escape perhaps?
marximus
New visitors - please read the rules.
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Mar 13, 2005 5:29 am

Thanks for that... but alas, it's not <Esc>. It is actually F9, but is highly dependent on the manufacturer of the motherboard. I have lots of PII/P3 motherboards with Award BIOSes at hand and, after checking all 23 of them, I found only two supported the F9 after-POST boot device selection screen. (It also reported "Press F9 for boot device after POST, Press DEL to enter Setup".) It wasn't a "hidden" fuction on all motherboards, simply removed, or an optional extra.

If I knew how to enable it by hacking the BIOS and re-flashing it, I would.

So there. Pehaps Award removed it because F9 was re-assigned later on for P4 motherboards with dual-BIOS recovery systems, RAID setups, etc.

It's a pity, because it's a damn useful function!

Mark
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