It's pretty hard for non-techies to find which key to hit so their PC boots off a USB keydrive, either by entering the BIOS > Boot menu (usually by hitting the Del key) or by having the BIOS display a menu (usually F12).
For users who still have Windows running sort of OK, I was thinking of writing a small app (in VB.Net) that would retrieve the maker + model of their motherboard, and look it up in a database so that I could tell the user how to proceed to have their PC boot off the USB key.
Does someone know of a library that I could use to retrieve hardward infos?
Also, does someone know if each BIOS vendor always use the same key/sequence to display the boot options?
Thank you.
WMI is your friend here. This example to get the serial number ( http://justlikeamagic.wordpress.com/2009/03/14/getting-motherboard-serial-number-using-wmi/ ) uses C# but the idea is the same.
MSDN lists all the potential data you can gather too, try here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394072%28VS.85%29.aspx. WMI is robust and usable from managed code.