Interesting development here. I decided to play with BIOS and shut off a core or two and try with and without hyperthreading. Laptop is a Dell Precision M4500, processor is an i7-740QM, 8GB RAM, boot device is a 240gb SSD. Video is nVidia Quadro 1800M.
Single core - boots normally with or without hyperthreading. Two cores - boots normally with hyperthreading disabled, breaks with hyperthreading enabled. Four cores - breaks with or without hyperthreading. This would lead me to believe the DM is trying to start before video is initialized since if I shut half the cores off I can get a normal boot. I could be wrong, but it makes sense to me :) Thanks -
