Is it a full hardware/software virtualization environment? By that I mean that when I fire up an instance under VMware, I actually see a full post from the BIOS up in the VM.
A month or so ago, this kindof bit me in the rear. On my workstation at home, my wife complained that she couldn't login to the desktop. I figured she'd hosed her password on it or something, so I logged in and was going to change her password for her, when it started complaining that her username didn't exist. "Strange", thought I . I looked in /etc/passwd and sure enough she wasn't there. Her home directory didn't exist in /home. Additionally, a quick look at 'df' didn't show quite all the drives I was expecting. I was not a very happy camper at that point, thinking something had really blown up bad on my desktop box. So I figured, what the heck, I'll reboot and see if it shows any weirdness on startup that would help me figure out what happened to the drives (I didn't do any serious forensics prior to trying this because the wife-unit was wanting to do something on it.)
The system shutdown cleanly... then rebooted.... with a big "VMware" graphic during the POST.
I'd forgotten that I'd left a test copy of FC5 running in full screen mode. DOH!
It does POST. It used to do it so fast you couldn't see it and therefore may have thought it wasn't there, but now they've made it so you can see what's happening.