Not having a bootable drive will also boot directly into bios
This is only circumstantially true. Computers such as the HP Elitebook 840 G3/G4/G5/G6 will all drop to either A) A boot device menu, or B) “BootDevice not found” black screen with no F key option to go to BIOS in the event of no OS or boot drive.
We work with a very broad array of equipment from different vendors so it has to be expected not all equipment like many desktop motherboard vendors have their boards configured to drop strait to BIOS in the absence of a boot device.
Believe me. If it was that simple I would not have posted my question. 
Oh Boy, you really took that seed, and Ran with it!
Nicely done man, and well documented.
It’s silly, but that’s exactly the kind of solution and problem solving that makes me happy inside.
You get many internet points!
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My knowledge is all over the place and I’m always learning new things. So when one conventional approach to a problem is proving fruitless I like to try and broaden the scope of alternative solutions even if they become increasingly unorthodox.
I wrote a WiKi here on this forum about Open Source iPXE, how to set it up and how to use it to network boot WinPE on a large scale for this purpose. A lot of time went into documenting that.
I’m contemplating writing another one based on how to deploy Windows with WinPE using a thumb drive because it bypasses one big problem Open Source iPXE has. No Secure Boot support. So you have to enter the BIOS and disable it on every UEFI computer you process then wait for the full iPXE procedure to take place. Very tedious on a large scale. Using WinPE on a USB stick complies with Secure Boot and skips strait to Windows installation…I don’t know if there’d be a interest from the community for something like that though…
I’m very happy to see it working too. Now if I can just get WMIC to do the same. 
I sometimes think about weather or not my solutions are following good practices but in this situation, it’s time efficient, looks like it will work in the field (tests in VM’s aren’t always representative of bare metal), it’s simple, it’s not a security risk (no data here is confidential), though it may be unorthodox it gets the job done the way I need it and damn anybody who tries to tell me it’s a bad solution without facts to back it up or providing a superior alternative.
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@Trooper_ish It almost worked first try. There’s an error with shutdown.exe where right after DISM finishes deploying the image if shutdown.exe -r /fw /t 0 is executed it will spit out an “environment” something something error.
But, if I run it again. It works.
So I took the lazy road and put it inside of an if loop with an %errorlevel% equ 0 condition. This looks to have successfully band-aided it.
I will be honest. This isn’t good practice and I’m not proud of it but I don’t have the leisure of the time to dig into what the apps problem is. Based on the behavior it seems like it’s a timing issue. Shutdown.exe trying to execute before DISM’s actually done, causing conflict maybe? timeout does not exist in WinPE either though I might be able to add it to create a delay if that’s the issue…
In any event it seems to be working. I imaged around ~220 laptops today only 4 of which had BIOS passwords. This expedited the process exponentially. Thank you.
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Phew, an actual practical time benefit to your work on this!
There could well be an actual correct solution from someone who uses Windows, but no-one piped up,
And you’ve already made a bit of a return on your time, so it’s not just for academic shizzl and grizzl like a lot of the stuff we often do here.
Keep it up man!
And any other projects like it 
(I like to live vicariously through you big brain people…)
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Time benefit at just making the job easier/less strenuous. Another large contributor to the time saving is how I’ve circumvented iPXE w/out Secure Boot. Just a pile of cheap thumb drives I installed WinPE directly to which support Secure Boot. This shaves off a lot of time.
As we are with the latest modifications I can max-out the imaging server at 1.125GB/s and image 20 laptops and have them staged to audit in under 20 minutes. Effectively imaging one laptop in sub-1 min time. I’m very impressed by that.
We have a second bench we need to get online as well. When we do I will have the potential to almost double that output. Crazy.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. That’s generally how it is asking forums for help. I was not aware of the /fw argument and that’s all I needed in order to accomplish what I did today so I’ll take this one as a win. I hope it replicates well on other models for other vendors.
As much as I enjoy learning cool tech for the sake of cool tech being able to apply it to something productive is very satisfying. It’s actually all that academic shizz that got me into this comfy little decent paying position I’m in right now.
It’s strange really, maybe I’m just humbled but it seems like the more I learn the less I actually know. Like the branches of a single tree in a dense forest. There’s just so much you could never learn it all in a single lifetime. So I’d say what stops you from exploring some of these things yourself? You can build all sorts of client, network, server stuff with very inexpensive parts if you just wanna get hands on and build cool shizz for yourself.
That sounds brutal 
Dell has an option in their boards to check for administrator passwords via SMBios, but, requires drive access again.
Have you thought about using a device with onboard memory and a script to press the buttons for you on a range of machines? 
Not sure how you’d replicate this to more than 1 machine at a time, but i’m sure it’s possible. We have the technology!