Must hit F1 key to boot 4

[thepump]

Whenever I turn my computer on or reboot a black screen with white text appears with info on my drives and keybord and a message telling me to press F1 to continue or F12 to boot from the network. My computer will stay on this screen until I press the F1 key. This started about a month ago.

 

[NewBudda]

I had the same problem once. I had just changed hard drives and the bios did not recognise one of them. I had to press F1 then it continued and later the drive was recognised in the explorer. Here is what I did:
1. Check the jumper settings: are all your drives set properly (Master/Slave)?
2. Are the harddrives properly installed? (That one did it for me)
3. Does your Bios support the size of the hard drive?

Let me know whether that helped... "Sharing knowledge is a way of achieving immortality"

 

[linney]

It would be interesting to know what the message on your screen is saying about your hardware.

I can only guess that this happening because your Bios is detecting an immenent failure (or failure) of hardware and is offering you a chance to fix the problem.

Did you add or remove any hardware a month ago, or adjust anything in your Bios?

A little bit of information can be found here.

http://groups.google.com/groups?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q="F1+to+boot"+windows+xp

 

[smah]

This sounds to me like the option to boot from a network device. Have a look at the boot device order in your bios. I can't remember exactly where it is, but I've seen it before.

 

[Marcs41]

Sounds a bit as if the bios has no harddisk(s) configured as boot device. If the solution is out there, let us know it was helpful, so others can benefit from it as well..

 

[Barte]

This was happening to me after I purchased a Microsoft Optical Mouse and attached it via USB. I attached the serial converter and plugged the mouse in and no more problem.