Grub hangs on boot up due to BIOS

After I install Ubuntu on an old laptop. It worked for a few hours and then failed to work after a reboot. All I get on screen was:

Grub Loading Stage 1.5

What in the world happen? Nothing was changed and now it’s broken. I managed to boot off a floppy and took a look at the partition and it looked OK. After an hour of fiddling with it, I decided to just reinstall. First I boot off a Windows ME startup disk and did:

fdisk /mbr

This restored the windows MBR so I can boot into windows. Everything was working under windows. I even did a scandisk and it found no errors. I decided to run Instlux again to reinstall. This time when I boot up the machine, I only got a message that grub is loading and then nothing.

hockeyman_102 on LinuxQuestions.org suggested that it was a BIOS or Hard disk problem. I was pretty sure it was not a hard disk problem, but I have never had a BIOS related issue before. I tried to going into the BIOS and select save. No dice. Finally, I selected the option to reload factory setting and everything was fixed.  I still have no idea what caused the BIOS to flake out in the first place.