Boot from HD or USB external drive Menu

[JackP]

I have a external USB drive that boots to DOS. I also have my BIOS set to boot from external drive first. What I want to do is somehow create a menu with option to boot to USB or standard HD boot with timer defaulting to the HD . Something like when the Windows CD is inserted "Hit any key to boot from CD"

I think the timer part is easy. I can probably do that with choice and a time out, but how to get computer to boot from HD, now that it has already booted to the DOS drive?

[foxidrive]

I don't think you can do it.

Once you boot from USB then the dos boot files will take over and load dos.
Even if you load a boot manager on the HDD it can't boot from your internal HDD.

What is the purpose of the dos boot? There are other ways to access dos from within windows.

[Squashman]

You should be able to do this with Smart Boot Manager. It hasn't been updated since 2011 but has been around for a long time and there really isn't much to update with a program like this.
http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/

[abc0502]

Edited:
Sorry for the mistake, The CD version is 8.6 not 8.3

In HirenBoot CD 8.6, It use a floppy disk image to boot to a menu that has two options, one for booting to the hiren cd and other to boot from HDD you can see this cd it has small size about 86 MB. I recommend this one.

And in the other hand if you can use the grub 4 dos it has the same thing ... i guess, it could have a menu that you can customize, i used it before when i was trying to make a bootable usb with some live systems but couldn't go with it .
<< but be ware that it might require you to format your HDD during the steps to install it >>