How to boot a H/PC on before CE is installed?

[Windowsbegood]

Title says it all, does anyone know how to boot a H/PC on before CE is installed?

[mrpijey]

You don't, the CE is supposed to be on ROM or on a ROM card, you don't install Windows CE like you would a PC or Mac. It's supposed to be pre-installed already.

[yourepicfailure]

Fundamentally, there is a firmware to initialize the microcontroller and other onboard peripherals when the device is turned on.
This firmware also serves to update the rom if it provides the functionality. I know some old Sylvania netbooks had this ability.

However, after the firmware has done its job of initalizing the hardware, it then proceeds to load the OS rom which has Windows CE or whatever OS burned onto it.
99% of firmwares do not provide something like a bios. They have one job, and they do that one job. It is not expected to need to do hardware setting configuration, all of that is pre-done as the device's OS image is being built. And since most hardware is soldered/permanent, there is also no need to change settings to accommodate a hardware change. Lastly, there is no need for the ability to boot an OS from an external media because good luck finding an alternate OS that can boot and run on whatever zanky microcontroller and hardware combination that device has.
So no, there is no way to load anything but the rom unless your device's firmware allows it to start a program (the ROM updater) from an external storage device. And devices like that are not common. Or it is not known how to enter and use the feature (if present).

An example is a Raspberry PI. Yes it has a firmware to initialize the onboard peripherals. After it's done with that task, it then looks at the SD card for an OS bootloader and does nothing else.