bypass the diskette boot

[rick_weth]

Hey all
Wouldn't it be great if there was a simple registry tweak that turned off the BIOS search for a bootable sector on the Diskette drive?
Well I think so, and I am wondering is it that easy? Is there some way for me to bypass this via registry, file manipulation, Activex?
I really need this for a process we are trying to test. I want to be able to toggle this capability.

[neilt]

As far as I know that's not possible. The registry loads after the BIOS searches for it's bootable drives. If you're wanting to restrict this the only way to do it is by disabling that feature in the BIOS and enabling the password funtion for CMOS.

[rick_weth]

Ok I was hopeing I might be able to bypass that. But my situation is unique.
Alternativley is there a fairly painless way to have a program on the diskette, that tells the os .. ok go to the C or d drive and boot off that?
For the average person that is preety useless, for me it would be just fine!

[RWSchlatter]

Do you understand the boot process of a computer ?

It is the BIOS program that gets started once you supply power, and it reads the CMOS settings for starting an initial program load. The CMOS configuration settings tell where the boot records are to be loaded from, and it is the program stored in the boot records that will decide from where which further program elements will be loaded. This all happens before a specific OS gets loaded, initialized and gets control of the machine.

So to repeat: it's never your diskette that tells the machine where to boot from, but CMOS settings.

What you probably want to have, is a boot manager which is stored on the diskette and run from a machine that will boot from the diskette (this is nowadays a rather unusual setup and you will have difficulties to find a boot manager that installs to drive A:).
As far as to asking from which drive and/or partition to boot from, this would again be standard procedure for a boot manager after proper setup.

If you could tell us about your unique situation, maybe a different approach could be suggested.

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Regards - Richard