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Boot Menu and Its Features

Today in this article we are aiming to understand the meaning of the boot and its feature, there is much time that was having a problem with installing new windows or upgrading or even changing to another OS, and we counter some problems that can be solved only with the bios changing. Aside from that today in this article were just gonna focus on how to get to the boot setting with some changing to bios, deeper look at the bios and its feature must be another article for another day.

Definition of the Boot

In short the Boot in the environment before installing an operating system on the computer, there is no such as an interface or any graphical items in it, and at the most, you get some functional key to move around the menu, if your planning on installing a new OS, you need to know the basic of the boot and the bios menu if it is needed.

The Bios menu is the deepest level of your system and through the bios menu, you can almost control anything on your computer.

In normal cases, you boot your computer from the hard drive and if your system has an OS on it and it is correct, the OS with show up, but there is the time that you need to boot your computer from other drives, like a flash drive or a DVD or CD, for example, you need to see if the Linux OS and its environments suit you, so you want to put a Flash drive into your pc and test it for yourself, in this situation you might find it difficult to get to boot menu.

Getting to the Boot Menu

For getting to the boot menu we have to option or two way ahead of us, one is more complicated and takes more time and another one is quite easy but it almost rare in the old computers. The first way is to change the order from the bios setting and force the system to boot from where you set them to do.

By using this method you have to change it through bios UEFI and by doing it you force the system to boot from that one drive every time you reboot your device or computer, so the system would try to first boot up the device from the flash drive and if there’s no bootable file in it or the flash drive is not connected the order will go after the second and the third option.

In this article, we completely explain two options and show you which one is better for you.

Method 1:Changing the boot order From Bios

The boot order of the computers, usually are managed by the UEFI and the setting of the UEFI have direct control over it, for accepting the menu, in the first step you have to restart your computer, and in the first picture you see, if you look at the corners of the screen you can see the specific button for entering the boot menu or the bios menu. However, for different systems and laptops, these buttons can be different, depending on your motherboard or the laptop manufacturer the key could be different.

After restarting your computer you have to see a text like this:

“Press <F12”> to enter setup”

“Press F2 to access the BIOS.”

Press the specific key at the right time to gain access to the bios menu.

In some cases, F12 and F2 keys are the most common keys to enter setup and have access to the boot menu, but the key can be different based on your motherboard and if your using a laptop, based on the manufacturer the keys might be something else if you can’t see the keys guide while the device is rebooting you can also try searching it model on the internet.

Also in some models, you need to hold down the Shift bottom and then try pressing the other bottom, in some sony laptops and especially in Vaio models, there are some specific keys to hold down to get to the bios menu.

If you’ve done all of the last steps correctly now you can see the Troubleshoot button on the screen, click on it, then Advanced Option, and finally, UEFI Firmware Setting must be visible to you.

When you get to see the bios window, from the upper bar try searching for the Boot word and select it, then look for  Option Priorities, in this section, you can see the boot options by their order, by default the order is on the hard drive for the first option.

Try re-order the menu by pressing up and down, then save and exit. After doing this, every time you try to boot your computer, the boot order first try to boot up the device from the USB drive or any order that you gave to it.

Method 2:Boot menu

This method also enables you to have access to all of the options for the Boot devices without needing to change the boot order, so its much faster and easier but also it doesn’t exist within the older computer, so if you’re using a device that it’s not too old, feel free to use this method. In the second method, you can also have access to the boot menu just by pressing the named key.