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I was transferring a set of existing raid drives into a second-hand server, an HP Gen9 server. I observed 2 interesting details:

  1. When I was configuring UEFI boot Order shown in the picture below, I saw many instances of Windows Boot Manager. NOTE, at that moment I had not booted from the newly inserted RAID drives even once yet.
    [Question] are those multiple instances of Windows Boot Manager the previous OSs that were running on this server?
  2. The OS of the existing RAID drives were successfully detected. They can be seen residing on the last item of the boot order Embedded RAID: Smart Array.... When the machine first booted after inserting the existing RAID, it went thru lengthy attempts of CD/DVD and NIC boots before booting into the RAID (win2008 R2). The second attempt to reboot the system however went straight into Windows.
    [Question] This seems to suggest that the boot info on the RAID was somehow transferred to the UEFI BIOS, did Windows do that or did the HP server did that? If I go into the UEFI boot Order again, I should expect one more Windows Boot Manager, 6 in total?

enter image description here

eliu
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  • Yeah UEFI persistence is a thing. *Caveat emptor* – Greg Askew Aug 26 '22 at 21:15
  • "With a BIOS firmware, your firmware level 'boot menu' is, necessarily, the disks connected to the system at boot time - no more, no less. This is not true with a UEFI firmware. The UEFI boot manager can be configured - simply put, you can add and remove entries from the 'boot menu'. The firmware can also (it fact the spec requires it to, in various cases) effectively 'generate' entries in this boot menu, according to the disks attached to the system and possibly some firmware configuration settings. It can also be examined - you can look at what's in it."" – eliu Aug 27 '22 at 15:44

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