[PLUG] HELP! Thinkpad hangs at BIOS

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:48:08 -0800
John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> dijo:

>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.

Well, I no sooner than hit the Send button after typing that on my
desktop computer, and suddenly the Thinkpad started booting. Fedora
came up normally, and here I am. 

Obviously, the first thing I will do is a thorough backup, although I
have copies of everything important elsewhere. Corralling them all for
a reinstall would be a pain, where a complete backup would make things
simpler, as well as more secure.

But in the meantime I don't dare shut the computer down. Is something
wrong with my BIOS? How to test? Is it related to the Virtualbox
issues? How could a hang of the computer cause the BIOS not to be able
to find Grub, or whatever it finds to boot Linux?