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It makes me wonder whether Windows updates could cause / resolve something like this. I always assume the BIOS/POST sequence is too isolated for that to be the case, but with UEFI there's much more access from the OS - to the extent that updating a BIOS can now trigger a process in Windows on next boot (like asking you to install motherboard software). And I remember that Windows malware that could exploit your BIOS boot image. So perhaps it's possible?

@sinbad definitely possible. Windows installs its own boot loader regardless of whether you're on EUFI or BIOS, hence why with a dual boot you have to install Windows before anything else, otherwise it just replaces the loader your other O/S installs with a loader that doesn't let you boot to anything else. So it makes sense that it'd be able to change that software at any point.

60 seconds though, doesn't sound like it'd be a malicious thing. Could be sanity checking something? Or clock skew?

@sinbad yeah, and if I remember rightly, DOS/Windows at least tells you when it's doing memcheck stuff?

Sure this isn't the first time she's booted that device since the clocks changed a couple weeks ago? And sure it didn't start happening after the previous change? If it's set to GMT instead of BST then that'd be causing a skew for 6 months every year, and I've seen those cause short boot hangs waiting for a time dependant daemon to give up and return execution. Granted not normally so early.

@dev_ric No, it doesn't line up with that (started early July, fixed itself early Dec). It's before the POST so Windows has no involvement. The only thing it could have done is to modify the UEFI settings somehow so that on next POST it does something different; it's not actively involved at that point

@sinbad before Windows doesn't necessarily mean before Microsoft code though. As far as I understand it, UEFI is fast because rather than probing the drives for an MBR and handing over to that, it just executes an EFI at a pre-configured location but the actual EFI can be anything. I mean... Obviously its purpose is to spin up everything else and hand over to the 'real' O/S, but programmatically it's just an executable like anything else. So if Windows dumps its own EFI for boot, it gets control

@sinbad not that I don't trust Microsoft or anything

@sinbad BIOS and IDEs with actual physical jumpers to define their boot order. Everything just worked with those!

Bit problematic if you want more than 4 drives mind