Press F10 on power up to get into the AMI BIOS screens. F12 forces a network boot.
The BIOS screen identifies it as the hp Thin Client BIOS setup Utility.
As of December 2017 the latest BIOS I'm aware of is 786R11 v1.05 which can be found in sp62324.exe.
For BIOS version(s) see the BIOS versions page.
It supports three boot devices (first, second and third) and these can be set to:
These are qualified by any hardware the BIOS finds:
For example, having plugged in a 1GB pen drive that I had to hand the entries on the Options submenu read;
USB:USB2.0 FlashDisk
HDD:PM-1GB ATA Flash Disk
Network:MBA v12.2.0 Slot 0500
Disabled
I'm not sure exactly what range of USB devices are supported, but I plugged in an 8GB USB pen-drive that had Tinycore 6.2 on it and that booted and ran without any problems.
I plugged a SATA DOM into the on-board SATA socket. It was recognised the BIOS - it appeared as the 'Secondary IDE Master' on the 'Standard CMOS features screen' - but did not appear as a boot option in the 'Advanced BIOS Features' screen. However if the IDE DOM is removed it becomes the HDD boot device.
If there is a BIOS password set and you don't know it, you only have read-only access to most of the BIOS settings. At the time of writing I'm not aware of a simple way of clearing the password as it is stored somewhere other than in the NVRAM. Removing the backup battery is no help.
A solution is to reflash/update the BIOS. A recent acquisition (July 2017) came with a BIOS password set. What I did was:
You may have to be a bit more inventive if your current BIOS settings prevent you from booting from USB.
The HP support pages offer:
I'm not too sure what mine has. When it boots it starts running an "HP Easy Tools" setup utility. I did subsequently acquire a few untested units that turned out to be running Windows Embedded Standard 7 (WES7).
Having downloaded and installed the HP ThinUpdate software on my Windows system I find that for the t510 under Recovery Images it offers me: