Pressing F10 allows the system to boot from the 'System Configuration' partition on the hard drive which is normally installed from the SmartStart setup cd when the system was first configured. My guess is, it was never installed in the first place. If you look at the partition tables on the hard drive (using 'fdisk'-DOS, disk manager - NT or Install - Netware) it is usually 36Meg in size. If it does not exist you will have to boot from the SmartStart cd and run the 'System Configuration'. The latest System Configuration can be downloaded from the Compaq web site.