Yeah if Delete Key doesn’t work then one of the F Keys, like F1, F2, F8, or F10.
Once I worked on a machine which didnt output any visuals during boot menu so I just monkeyed around with ups and downs and enters until I got it to boot from different media.
1970s: Hardware configuration settings? All the chips are soldered down, there’s a port for a floppy drive and a port for a cassette drive. Write your software for the peripherals it needs.
Early 80s: So there are some expansion slots in the case, and a bank of 12 tiny DIP switches on the motherboard to set the configuration. Most of what it needs to know is how much RAM is installed.
Mid 80s: The computer comes with a diskette that has a program on it that will allow you to set the configuration in software, it’ll be stored in battery backed RAM in the RTC circuit.
Late 80s: We’re building that configuration UI into the firmware itself so you don’t need separate software. You can enter the BIOS config menu by pressing the F11 key before the OS boots.
Early 90s: F11? I thought it was F12!
Mid 90s: The company I bought my desktop from also makes compact laptops that don’t have a hardware F11 or F12 key, Those are Fn+F1 and Fn+F2, and the Fn key doesn’t work in the BIOS because it was implemented as an OS feature. So they use F2, and they use it on all the computers they make so they don’t have to maintain a special branch of the BIOS.
Late 90s: Okay so this is getting more important because we don’t just have two floppies and a hard drive now; “Try booting from A, Try booting from B, Try booting from C” starts to break when computers might have more than one hard drive and possibly more than one optical drive. We’re going to need to make that configurable.
Early 2000s: The old BIOS standard is starting to get long in the tooth, we’re basically shipping firmware designed 20 years ago. It needs a refresh called UEFI.
Mid 2000s: As part of that new standard, we’re going to standardize the key to enter the firmware config menu right? Right?!
Late 2000s: Our multimedia PC maps the function keys to media keys by default and you have to hold the fn key to actually throw an F1 through F12 keypress. Again that doesn’t work outside of Windows so we use the Delete key.
Early 10s: Booting from USB flash drives is a thing now, the whole drive is removable so there’s no realistic way to put “boot from USB drive” permanently ahead of the hard drive in the boot order, it would be handy to have a separate menu just to temporarily choose which drive to boot from. Since we use F11 for the settings menu, we’ll use F2 for the boot menu.
Mid 10s: We use F8 for that.
Late 10s: Hey, we could speed up boot times if we significantly shortened the duration during boot when its waiting for the user to do that, and print the instructions to the screen for less time than it takes to read.
Early 20s: What if we let you disable that menu entirely from within that menu, for the sake of skipping that delay entirely? Which also means you can’t get back into the menu to re-enable it?
Mid 20s: What if nobody could ever afford computers again? Wouldn’t that be fun?
As a former legacy BIOS and UEFI developer, who has also done a ton of basic IT support… thank you, I am now having traumatic flashbacks (and I even had access to the firmware code! But that’s not always enough… Never enough.)
These days I can’t even very leftover prototypes to use, dang.
You monster! Now I’m having UCHI, OHCI, and EHCI flashbacks, how finicky those first keyboards were, and the bios emulation layer used to make them seem like a normal PS/2 keyboard.
This was very illuminating, as someone who’s wondered for a good while. Could someone direct me to resources that further contextualize the details about how this stayed so non-standardized for so long(with no solution in immediate sight?)
Might have something to do with the PC’s origin as a de facto industry standard: How the only actual IP rights IBM had over the 5150 (other than the IBM and Personal Computer trademarks) was the copyright on the BIOS. The rest of the machine was off-the-shelf parts that IBM had no ownership of. Compaq’s compatible but different BIOS won in court and that’s how we got a bunch of random vendors making compatible computers.
Funnily enough that happened during the “DIP switches for amount of RAM” era when the BIOS was pretty much entirely transparent to the user.
Windows defaults to quick startup which hibernates the kernel. So your PC is technically in hibernation and you don’t want to mess with bios settings when it’s in that mode. Some bioses dgaf, some are smart enough to know the difference, and some just say “nah”.
You can also just turn off fast boot if that’s annoying. On an SSD the difference isn’t that much. But on an HDD it halved my boot time back on windows 8.
For anyone who is asking, yeah, I figured it out.
<del> key
Yeah if Delete Key doesn’t work then one of the F Keys, like F1, F2, F8, or F10.
Once I worked on a machine which didnt output any visuals during boot menu so I just monkeyed around with ups and downs and enters until I got it to boot from different media.
Ah the joys of tech debt.
1970s: Hardware configuration settings? All the chips are soldered down, there’s a port for a floppy drive and a port for a cassette drive. Write your software for the peripherals it needs.
Early 80s: So there are some expansion slots in the case, and a bank of 12 tiny DIP switches on the motherboard to set the configuration. Most of what it needs to know is how much RAM is installed.
Mid 80s: The computer comes with a diskette that has a program on it that will allow you to set the configuration in software, it’ll be stored in battery backed RAM in the RTC circuit.
Late 80s: We’re building that configuration UI into the firmware itself so you don’t need separate software. You can enter the BIOS config menu by pressing the F11 key before the OS boots.
Early 90s: F11? I thought it was F12!
Mid 90s: The company I bought my desktop from also makes compact laptops that don’t have a hardware F11 or F12 key, Those are Fn+F1 and Fn+F2, and the Fn key doesn’t work in the BIOS because it was implemented as an OS feature. So they use F2, and they use it on all the computers they make so they don’t have to maintain a special branch of the BIOS.
Late 90s: Okay so this is getting more important because we don’t just have two floppies and a hard drive now; “Try booting from A, Try booting from B, Try booting from C” starts to break when computers might have more than one hard drive and possibly more than one optical drive. We’re going to need to make that configurable.
Early 2000s: The old BIOS standard is starting to get long in the tooth, we’re basically shipping firmware designed 20 years ago. It needs a refresh called UEFI.
Mid 2000s: As part of that new standard, we’re going to standardize the key to enter the firmware config menu right? Right?!
Late 2000s: Our multimedia PC maps the function keys to media keys by default and you have to hold the fn key to actually throw an F1 through F12 keypress. Again that doesn’t work outside of Windows so we use the Delete key.
Early 10s: Booting from USB flash drives is a thing now, the whole drive is removable so there’s no realistic way to put “boot from USB drive” permanently ahead of the hard drive in the boot order, it would be handy to have a separate menu just to temporarily choose which drive to boot from. Since we use F11 for the settings menu, we’ll use F2 for the boot menu.
Mid 10s: We use F8 for that.
Late 10s: Hey, we could speed up boot times if we significantly shortened the duration during boot when its waiting for the user to do that, and print the instructions to the screen for less time than it takes to read.
Early 20s: What if we let you disable that menu entirely from within that menu, for the sake of skipping that delay entirely? Which also means you can’t get back into the menu to re-enable it?
Mid 20s: What if nobody could ever afford computers again? Wouldn’t that be fun?
As a former legacy BIOS and UEFI developer, who has also done a ton of basic IT support… thank you, I am now having traumatic flashbacks (and I even had access to the firmware code! But that’s not always enough… Never enough.)
These days I can’t even very leftover prototypes to use, dang.
Allow me to do further psychic damage: at the turn of the century, USB keyboards happened.
You monster! Now I’m having UCHI, OHCI, and EHCI flashbacks, how finicky those first keyboards were, and the bios emulation layer used to make them seem like a normal PS/2 keyboard.
Why???
I’ve only briefly glanced under USBs hood, and holy shit I’m amazed it works at all.
I am screaming at the screen
This was very illuminating, as someone who’s wondered for a good while. Could someone direct me to resources that further contextualize the details about how this stayed so non-standardized for so long(with no solution in immediate sight?)
Might have something to do with the PC’s origin as a de facto industry standard: How the only actual IP rights IBM had over the 5150 (other than the IBM and Personal Computer trademarks) was the copyright on the BIOS. The rest of the machine was off-the-shelf parts that IBM had no ownership of. Compaq’s compatible but different BIOS won in court and that’s how we got a bunch of random vendors making compatible computers.
Funnily enough that happened during the “DIP switches for amount of RAM” era when the BIOS was pretty much entirely transparent to the user.
[ins]gets used on some systems too.Yeah I was pressing all the f-keys and nothing.
Smashing the del key a dozen times finally worked
Also in windows reboot, don’t shut down.
Windows defaults to quick startup which hibernates the kernel. So your PC is technically in hibernation and you don’t want to mess with bios settings when it’s in that mode. Some bioses dgaf, some are smart enough to know the difference, and some just say “nah”.
You can also just turn off fast boot if that’s annoying. On an SSD the difference isn’t that much. But on an HDD it halved my boot time back on windows 8.
If you are on windows 11 (maybe 10 as well?) my easiest way to get there these days is hold shift when clicking restart.