I have a lab of 40 new Precision 3650s and we use Symantec Ghost to handle imaging. I've noticed that after imaging to replace the Dell copy of windows with our own, the boot loader for the newly installed OS appears, by default, at the bottom of the boot list beneath HTTP and PXE boot entries. In both cases (either HTTP boot or PXE boot) when that boot fails, the system hangs rather than eventually making its way to the UEFI boot loader for my Windows image so every time I image the machine I would have to visit the BIOS to change the boot order.

I disabled PXE/HTTP boot for the integrated NICs which would solve the problem, but I also have 10G NICs (the ones we're really using) and PXE remains enabled and taking precedence for those. It looks like we could also use an Intel configuration utility to disable PXE booting in the 10G NIC firmware. I'm just wondering if there is another way to solve this in the Dell BIOS.

I have slightly older systems (Precision 3620) with an earlier version of the Dell BIOS interface that don't behave like this. For those machines, newly imaged machines have the windows boot loader at the start of the boot order. Is there a good reason for this change in behavior?