Your computer booted into an unfamiliar operating system,
and you were seeing lots of the normal boot things on-screen
BECAUSE THE OS DOES THAT. Nothing wrong with the BIOS.

It's just a matter of booting from something (floppy, CD)
other than the 'unknown' system, then all will look normal.
Some BIOS'es are hard to enter at boot time (there's a few
seconds when they look for a keyboard entry, otherwise
it just boots up fast from the hard disk).

The good news, is that the boot process DID happen from
the unknown drive, even though it looked odd on your screen
(probably your computer had the wrong hardware to satisfy the
boot-time sequence on that hard drive). Maybe the
screen gibberish means the video card driver was not
autoidentified, and the freeze was because you didn't log in.