An open letter to all who have an INTEL mobo that shows up on your screen as opposed to the vendors logo. In this case there may or may not be the bios keys displayed. For INTEL it is F2. If there is NO key displayed that means the board has been set to "SILENT BOOT". In this case TAP F2 multiple times starting at the BLACK screen. The bios will appear. Under BOOT change SILENT BOOT from ENABLED to DISABLED. Then put CD ROM first in BOOT ORDER. The BIOS screen may differ in appearance but if it is an INTEL board with INTEL on the screen chances are that the same screen will be present on all vendors desktops. I have never ran into this issue. This was new to me. Only trial and error solved it. Intel was of no help. Hope this helps.
I don't really see the point in starting a thread like this... Hitting TAB or Escape will hide the BIOS image and display BIOS post messages. F1, F2, F8, F10 and F12 are usual buttons to enter the BIOS setup. Randomly pressing those should halt booting and display at least some menu to the user (eg. select boot device). To be safe, start tapping F8 when the screen goes blank after the BIOS image/post messages (just in case bios doesn't load). F8 will halt windows from booting.
I started this thread only because I never encountered this issue and there were no onscreen keys at all. I had no choice but to experiment until I found the answer. I tried all the F keys one at a time both in single attemps and multiple keys in a single attempt. I knew nothing of a SILENT BOOT mode. I just wanted other members to be aware of this. Now that the issue is solved I will not need to write about it again.
moved to correct forum as not a windows issue. that might not work on all intel made motherboards as some of the older boards you have to move a jumper 1st to allow changes to bios then put jumper back to allow boot into windows.
