Xyratex HB-1235 Management

This sounds like what i did with windows pretty much. Hooked the MO-297 SSD up to another computer, made a VM in HyperV with that drive as the physical medium, and then installed Windows to it with the drivers for the Intel NIC slipped in for good measures and an answer file to turn off the firewall and turn on RDP. Right before it rebooted into a certain point in setup i shut it down, put it back in the appliance, booted it, and in a few minutes i saw it pulling a DHCP addy. RDP’d in, moved over some of the firmware flashing utilities i saved from the disk before blowing it away (made an image with Acronis first too). Then used those utils (yafu was what was on the box, “yet another firmware updater”?) and another IPMI util to re-flash the firmware for the ASpeed OOB controller and told it to blow away the existing config, and then was able to login using the MegaRAC default login creds IIRC. Was then able to do a proper install of server 2012R2 on the device. I think using the original method required me to use the serial port to manually execute the efi boot file each time the box would reboot until i ran windows setup on the device and it made a UEFI boot entry properly. I couldn’t make one manually since i couldn’t get into the UEFI thanks to a password i could not get rid of. I cant recall if i tried overwriting the firmware or not to attempt to get into it. I know i learned a lot about UEFI firmware structure in the process.