If it's occurring at the BIOS level, then it's probably a hardware or firmware issue.
Intermittent problems are especially suspicious.
My primary linux system's BIOS doesn't recognize its entire 13GB drive, but that's not a problem, because i keep the root partition in the lower region of the drive. Once Linux boots, the BIOS's view of your drive is irrelevant. So, you could downgrade your BIOS in the hopes that it would fix the video problem, and Linux would still be able to work with your 4.3 GB drive.