Quote Originally Posted by chip.ling
Thanks for the URL link. I eventually found my machine's Technical Reference Manual with other manuals from the site. My machine is Compad DeskPro 2000 Pentium 166MMX. One of the manual mentioned that I suppose to be able to go into the BIOS setting by hitting F10 during the POST stage. F10 is for the setup and F12 is the boot from the NIC.

But I do not see such F10/F12 notice when I boot my machine. Strange!
I finally find out why the F10 is not showing up on my computer.

I read through the Compaq Technical Reference Guide for DeskPro 2000. A lot of information there but does not answer my question. (it is a very very good manual, even with asm call to the bios)

Then I switch to another one called Compaq Maintenance & Service Guide, and I find my answer there:
1. (The good news) Press F10 when on the boot up POST stage will bring up the config utility program.
2. (The bad news) The config utility program is not on the ROM, it is on a small separate harddisk partition called diagnostics partition.

So in my case, my old harddisk crashed and I replace it with a new one. That diagnostics partition and the utility program is not on the new harddisk and that's why the F10 prompt never show up.

I will go to the Compaq support site and see if I can download the diagnostics utility program and run it to set the BIOS. Wish me good luck man!