Inspiron 8100 BIOS options – boot order

Hi,

I have three questions regarding my ollld Inspiron 8100. A LOT of time spent chatting/transferring/talking with Dell returned only vague answers, so I hope someone here can help a bit more. The BIOS is updated to A15, the latest version available for this machine.

1) Boot order oddity:

Looking at the boot order screen in BIOS, it lists (in this order) Diskette Drive; Internal HDD; CD/DVD Drive.

Not a problem per se, but an oddity. I have a working copy of Windows XP on the HDD, but when I put a Knoppix Live CD in, it boots to Knoppox without a problem. But this shouldn’t be, should it? Since HDD is a higher priority, and there is an OS, what’s going on?

2) Booting from a flash drive:

As an old machine with only 512MB RAM, Windows is very, very slow. Since I occasionally (very occasionally) need to use it for work, I can’t fully escape from MS. But for day to day running (I keep it in the parlor to stream music to the receiver), I just need a very small bit of functionality. I’d love to put Knoppix or DSL on a flash drive and boost the speed of the machine (even a small boost will be great). But can I?

3) Boot order menu choices:

Aside from the main three, I have: Modular Bay HDD; Cardbus NIC; APR NIC; and Mini-PCI NIC as options. What are those? I assume Modular Bay is a second harddrive (but am not sure), and one of those is probably for booting via the built-in LAN, but which one? What is the third? Is there any way of taking advantage of one of those to boot Linux?

Hope someone can help!

Thanks,

Rhythm