The background: I have an IBM Thinkpad T20.

Last night I made the decision to go GNU. I felt like starting afresh, so I formatted my whole hard drive, made GNU partitions [/ and swap], and some new ones for FreeBSD and MINIX. Installing the GNU went fairly well, though the final reboot was a hard reboot [don't remember why], and thus the partition comes back as still mounted. I guess it is relevant that all Mach boots had to go through SGD, maybe GRUB wasn't installed or something [yes, the partition was bootable]. Anyway, thanks to the bad umount, I can't use the GNU.

So I figured the next thing to do was to get another system up and fsck from that. I went through the install of FreeBSD 6.2-R, and got it to overwrite the MBR to boot FreeBSD directly. Again, the install went great, but the system didn't boot to FreeBSD on restart.

And that's when the problem began. LiveCDs wouldn't boot. Even SGD won't boot now. That means something serious is up! So on restart, F12 [choose a boot device] and F1 [BIOS settings] do nothing. The screen mentions the usual Intel Boot Agent 2.06, the screen jumps off and back on, and then nothing.

Any ideas on where the flakyness is, or what I could try to fix it? Why do BIOS directives fail?

UPDATE: apparently, the BIOS confuses FreeBSD boot sectors with suspend to disk directives. There's a bit of information online. Looks like I'm going to have a fun few days.

Plan of action: make bios fix disk, remove HD, update bios. Let you know if that fails. First, though, I've got to get my floppy disk drive working. It's rejected a few disks now, I'm putting it down to the thing being full of dust.