Thanks for the info! I discovered that there's some odd interaction 
between the 3COM NIC and the Compaq that always gets me to the LAN boot 
situation.  There is no jumper on the NIC.  I did discover that PXE is a 
LAN protocol that is a choice in the Master Boot Agent but it didn't 
give me a choice of not booting from the LAN. After some discussion with 
Compaq, I ended up installing a Belkin NIC (Realtec chip) and it boots 
correctly and works just fine. I've used these 3COM NICs in lots of 
computers (since I have the driver for it), never encountered this problem.
I also discovered if I press "esc" during the splash screen (without the 
3COM NIC), it boots right into the OS without the 1 minute wait.
David Gillett wrote:
> On 29 Jul 2006 at 8:59, Russ Cox wrote:
>
>   
>> I want to install a NIC temporarily so I can download updates.  When I 
>> install a 3COM NIC, the computer tries to boot from the network and of 
>> course fails. Then it hangs and will not proceed to boot.  There is no 
>> boot sequence choice in setup so I can't eliminate the network boot 
>> option.  Any ideas?
>>     
>
>   This isn't typical default behaviour.  There may be a jumper on the NIC 
> that is enabling this option; it may be labelled "PXE".  In that case, 
> removing the jumper would correct it.
>
> David Gillett
>
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>   

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