Matt Graham wrote:
> From: Dennis Kibbe <dennisk@linuxquestions.net>
>> On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 06:45 -0700, Michael Havens wrote:
>>> if you press f11 & f12 at startup it will let you temporarily choose which
> 
>>> device you want to startup with.
>> The three whays I know of bringing up a boot menu are:
>>
>> F12 (Dell)
>> F2 (Compaq)
>> ESC (Compaq, I think)
>>
>> If you watch the boot process there may be a message telling you the
>> correct key to press to get to the menu.
> 
> The thing that should always work is to hold down any key while the machine
> is POSTing.  Then is should display "Keyboard stuck key failure, press
> $FOO to enter Setup, $BAR to continue."  (This assumes the machine has a
> keyboard and a monitor attached, of course.)

This only works if you have your BIOS set to stop on keyboard errors. 
That's always the first thing I turn off.  I can't tell you how many 
times I've gotten this error:

"Keyboard not found.  Press any key to continue."

Better to just turn off all keyboard errors than to deal with that ;-)

Kurt