Thanks Bill2 for your reply. I again sifted through the BIOS for the possibilities you mentione but could not find anything like the BIOS settings in the example. I've gone through and through and tried different settings but nothing seems to work yet. I have a suspicion that the F1 problem may be connected to the fact that I have two drives in the machine, one is an old ATA and the other is a small super fast SATA drive. The boot order setting is only for "hard drive, cdrom, removable drive" and nothing else. In another BIOS screen in "Boot settings" the two drives are listed as #1 and #2. The ATA drive has been listed all along as #1 so I changed it to have the SATA drive as #1 but it made no difference. I don't know where to go from here.