booting from removable media

I've noticed several proposed fixes, to various problem, have included booting from a floppy drive, or CD-ROM. Since I'm fairly new to SuSe, I was wondering if you can boot from the install CD/Floppies, and exit the install program, to get the desired results, or is everyone building a separate floppy install? There's a "boot:" prompt for a few seconds, before the install program begins to load, but I have not been able to find a list of acceptable commands to enter there, to different things. Any help would be appreciated.