An invisible BIOS, driven blind
⚠ This is not a live capture: it is a condensed reconstruction, edited afterwards from the real session transcript. The prompts and the stop messages are the ones from the actual session; the timing is compressed and the long waits are cut. Hostnames sanitized.
The Cabinet’s BIOS was invisible: the discrete GPU swallows the video output, the iKVM console sees nothing, and Setup draws nothing over the serial port. It still had to be entered, to unblock the NixOS install.
What follows is a blind search through a space you cannot observe: proving the keys land (by saving without changing anything), discovering the arrows were never arriving (wrong serial encoding), ending up in the Intel ME firmware by mistake, and breaking the boot with Load Optimized Defaults. The way out does not go through the BIOS — it goes around it.
Claude Code was driving, remotely, while the hardware’s owner was on vacation. The BIOS screen was never seen once.