Pat,
It's asking if you want to start a bootp request from your Ethernet card, which would broadcast for a "boot" server to provide the operating system for you over the network.
In other words, it's giving you the option that's used for "Diskless Workstations", which don't have a hard disk, to download your OS from another network node and start it in memory. It's the same process your BIOS performs during boot, except that the image that's loaded into your machine's ram comes from another computer on your LAN, not from your hard drive.
Bootp is one of the core protocols from the early days of the internet, when disk drives were too expensive to be installed in every workstation, and they had to be able to leverage the common disk drive storage available on a central server just to get their operating system started.
Believe it or not, it's gaining in popularity again, but this time for public-access or school computers that are prone to misuse. With BOOTP machines, curing a virus or adware or whatever is as simple as turning the machine off and back on, and the clients I've set up this way always swear they'll never go back.
HTH.
William
(Filter noise from my address for direct replies)
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But I still do not understand _how_ the network card, or PCMCIA or whatever is able to do that job without first itself getting installed by (for example) Windows or whatever OS is in the terminal/workstation. I mean, that would be great if I could just turn on the laptop and have its OS installed by the desktop Win 2000. But how? PAT]