The boot order determines as you know the order in which the various
possible bootable devices in the system are polled and this order is
usually set in the bios. Many users have their systems permanently set to
boot in the following order 1) floppy 2) CD 3) hard disk to avoid having
to enter the bios each time they want to boot from other than their hard
disk. On not finding a bootable floppy or CD the system will boot from
the hard disk. However this solution has some risk, for example if an
infected bootable floppy disk is left in the drive by mistake after the
user had perhaps been checking the contents of the disk in the previous
session.

There are some modern systems that allow the user to change the boot order
from within the operating system whilst the system is running rather than
having to access the bios directly. This is the method used by my Toshiba
Portégé M300 laptop.

Cheers,
--
Mike Maltby



canna wrote:

Sorry Mike, you were correct I could not boot to win Me and the only
way was to use a boot disk. What I meant in the last post was is
there a quick way to tell your PC to run using the boot floppy rather
than going into setup (BIOS) and changing the 1st boot from IDE 0 to
floppy.