Simon Hobson <linux@???> writes:

[...]

> Besides, (on bare metal) there's all that BIOS stuff that happens
> before the OS even gets a look-in - I sometimes wonder if Dell and HP
> have a competition on how long they can make this process !

That may (in absence of "hardware RAID") be simply to fix: Disable PXE
boot. For some reason lost in the mists of time[*], that's always
enabled by default and it has a fairly long timeout (easily longer than
all of the remaining boot process).

[*] I used that for setting up a diskless NetBSD system (supposed to be
used by many 'small computers') in 2001 or 2002 but haven't ever
encountered it since.