(accidentally solved) Arch not recognized by BIOS

Question

Note: this should've been posted in the "Kernel & Hardware" section, if a moderator could move it, that would be helpful.
I'm creating this thread as a followup to my previous thread (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=151454), because I've discovered the issue here really isn't related to syslinux or GPT at all. Though, in fact, I have no idea what causes this in any capacity.
My laptop is a Lenovo IdeaPad Z575, the one with the A6-3420M APU, 6GB DDR3/1333, and the discrete Radeon graphics card (disabled in BIOS).
I installed Arch according to the Beginners' Guide. I have installed Arch several times before on 4 different machines, including one really strange and problematic server, so I'm fairly used to some of the normal problems that would arise. However, this one I can't even begin to troubleshoot.
At first, I used a GPT partition table and syslinux bootloader for my installation. The BIOS refused to even boot to the hard disk (yes, it skips it and goes directly to PXE, at the very bottom of the boot order). If I pressed F12 and forced it to boot to the hard drive, there was a momentary flashing cursor, and then the screen would flicker and it would try to boot PXE again.
I figured this was an incompatibility of my BIOS with the GPT partition table; that's not all that uncommon. But here's the interesting (and immensely frustrating) part: I installed Arch with an MS-DOS partition table and did everything all over again. I installed syslinux and ran syslinux-install_update -iam and it installed the bootloader successfully.
The problem persists. I tried both AHCI and "Compatible" SATA modes in BIOS; that's about the only configurable option that has anything to do with it.
I /was/ going to remove the hard drive and try to boot to it from a test motherboard, HOWEVER Lenovo's brilliant engineering made the hard disk absolutely non-removable. Their manual says to remove a single screw and pull on the black tab, in order to pop the disk out. I pulled (quite hard, too) on the flimsy plastic tab, and it did nothing other than bend the metal on the end of the hard drive enclosure. Fantastic.
So, I have really nothing else to troubleshoot here, and it's long past the time I can return this laptop. So other than being out $600, what else can I do?
(Note: I wiped the system restore partition and the Windows 7 installation the day I obtained it. I booted into 7 once to verify that it could boot, but beyond that I did nothing with it.)
Last edited by gdea73 (2012-10-30 23:21:15)

Answer 1

Alright this will be a bit of a pain to transcribe, but I'll try.
Some quirks of the initial installation were that genfstab only picked up the root partition and not home or swap so I had to add them... I did so carefully though and I think the fstab file is alright.
I may try grub2 in a bit just to see. It really sucks though if that's the case, I liked syslinux much better. But I'll try. Oh, right fdisk, here...
http://sprunge.us/SFCf
Last edited by gdea73 (2012-10-30 21:50:54)