Smart Boot Manager is a boot manager which will recognize partitions, including CD-Roms and then boot to them.

I have used it off and on for years, particularly on older notebooks, especially ones with BIOS problems on recognizing Bootable CD's.

The boot manager installs on a floppy and is 200-300KB if my memory is correct.

A link is http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html