Well, BIOS is fundamental. It's basically the low level operating system that allows the main OS to communicate with the computer hardware, controlling things like clock speeds, memory frequencies, processor virtualization, where the OS boots from, even how fast the fans move.
Some computer hardware does support remote boot over the network (controlled through BIOS) and of course, multiple system images (much similar to when you run both windows and OS X on a Mac.)
It's certainly possible there was another OS on there that could read and write to the disks that were used by the primary voting software.
I run my own server. It hasn't been plugged into a monitor, keyboard, or mouse in years. It's plugged into a power cord, and an Ethernet cord, that's it. Everything is controlled remotely - read, write, and delete files. All that's required is an ethernet connection. I have about 1/10000000th of the budget and knowledge of the people that deployed the voting systems.
Well, BIOS is fundamental. It's basically the low level operating system that allows the main OS to communicate with the computer hardware, controlling things like clock speeds, memory frequencies, processor virtualization, where the OS boots from, even how fast the fans move.
Some computer hardware does support remote boot over the network (controlled through BIOS) and of course, multiple system images (much similar to when you run both windows and OS X on a Mac.)
It's certainly possible there was another OS on there that could read and write to the disks that were used by the primary voting software.
I run my own server. It hasn't been plugged into a monitor, keyboard, or mouse in years. It's plugged into a power cord, and an Ethernet cord, that's it. Everything is controlled remotely - read, write, and delete files. All that's required is an ethernet connection. I have about 1/10000000th of the budget and knowledge of the people that deployed the voting systems.