Floppy to pick boot device?

[Darundal]

I have an old (OLD) laptop that doesn't let me change the order of the boot devices, or let me select the CD drive as one. I used to have a floppy with a that, when inserted, would load a program that lets me select what device to boot from (in the case of the laptop, it let me boot from the CD drive), and was useful beyond description for many other hardware repair tasks. I am wondering if anyone knows the name of anything similar to this, as I seriously miss this functionality...thanks!

 

[thrawn86]

Well a standard boot disc will give you a prompt allowing you to run x:/setup.exe or whatever from your cdrom drive.

you can't hold f8 or something during boot to get a boot options menu?

 

[Chernobyl1]

Its a good idea to run smartdrv.exe from DOS before starting the installation otherwise an install can take much longer.

Smartdrv is a caching utility that speeds up hard drive access by orders of magnitude in DOS.
You will find it on a Windows boot floppy.
It is version specific so dont try to run it from a different version of DOS to that which you booted.

 

[iSkylla]

Just out of curiosity, is the BIOS locked or something so you can't change the boot order?