Getting into bios on an HP PAvilion

Anyone know the key for getting into bios on an HP Pavilion?? i tried DEL, and f10 and f1.. none worked

F2, I think. What model is it?

ok, yeah, it was F1. Anyway, I am trying to help my brother install XP on his Pavilion. He used FDisk to recreate a partition and format the HD. We went the FDisk route because th HP wont read from the CDROm first. We tried changing to read from CDROM first through the Bios and it still doesnt seem to want to do it. Now that ther eis no OS on the PC, he rebooted with the XP disk in and it gave an error saying soemthing to the effect of Wrong System disk, please insert correct or remove disk and hit any key. But that doesnt make sense. Anyone ever go through this? What did you do to correct it?

thanx

sounds like u don't have a bootable XP CD, that error means u need to put a valid (not an upgraded) bootable XP CD in.

Its an original XP Home upgrade. It should still work. I've had it work on mine this way when I reformatted the first time. Then it will ask you to place a valid previous OS into your CDROM drive to verify you had a previous OS. It's got to be an HP thing.