> There's some funny BIOS problem connected with the hard drives. Occasionally, the computer fails to detect any drives at all and waits on "press F10 to enter setup". More often it detects the drive but fails to boot
--Have you tried replacing the CMOS battery and SATA cables? Also might want to check the power supply, if it's more than 4 years old it might be worth replacing with a higher wattage/more efficient model.
> What if I wanted to go back to 7/8?
--Running a full image backup with the free bootable system rescue cd and ntfsclone to an external USB drive is probably a very good bet... HOWTOs are available if you do a search. See distrowatch.com to download system rescue cd. Oh, you should also do an ' fdisk -l ' from the cd and DD backup the boot partition as well.
--Of course, if you have a lot of non-US content, it may actually be cheaper/more convenient to have a 2nd drive installed that is permanently locked to that region rather than flashing back and forth...
The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get to work.