[PLUG] HELP! Thinkpad hangs at BIOS

[John Jason Jordan]

OK, now I,ve done it. My Thinkpad T61 with Fedora 16, x86_64 hangs at the Thinkpad splash screen. It says "To interrupt normal startup, press the blue ThinkVantage button." From past experience, pressing this button takes me to the BIOS configuration page, but now it does nothing. It just hangs, no flashing lights, nada.

This occurred while rebooting the umpteenth time today. The reason for the reboots is that I have been trying to get Virtualbox running again. For my most recent exercise I uninstalled 3.2 and installed 4.1 with Yumex. These are the Oracle versions, not the OSE versions. Virtualbox launches fine, but when I try to start either of the Windows virtual machines the computer locks up. /var/log/messages is silent. 

I know nothing of BIOS problems. At the moment my main computer is dead and I need it back ASAP.