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What is the BIOS?

How to access the BIOS

To enter to the BIOS (actually UEFI since a few years), reboot and press a key like DEL, F2, F12 before the computer boots: which one to use depends on your hardware.

From the BIOS you can usually change some hardware settings and tell the system to try and boot from a USB or CD drive rather than the hard disk: this is very useful to use LiveCDs.

If you have a very old computer that can only boot from floppy disk you can use rawrite to create a boot floppy that loads a CD.

Free and Open Source BIOS

Debian's mission is to provide you with a free operating system, but the proprietary BIOS that comes with your computer is also software that can, sometimes, be replaced by free software.

Several free and open source BIOS projects exist, which we list at Firmware/Open