I can't boot the installer on my machine

I have a Thinkpad T440p running Coreboot+SeaBIOS.

I have utterly failed to get the installer to boot on this machine. I have tried dding memstick.img, disc1.iso, and dvd1.iso to a USB stick as well as burning disc1.iso to a DVD-R. I verified the checksums on all downloaded files. I tested all of the media on another machine running the stock Lenovo firmware and all of them work. I also tested the downloaded files in a QEMU virtual machine with SeaBIOS and they work.

On the SeaBIOS machine, it does not even recognize the USB stick at all, and the DVD-R hangs on "Starting the BTX loader". But it has no problem recognizing and booting any Linux distro's installer from the same USB stick.
 
FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img is for 32 bit processors only and won't work on your 64-bit laptop.
The i386 version will work just fine on a modern Intel 64 CPU. That's the whole point of those 64 bit extensions. It's not the ideal version to run, I can agree on that, but it'll work just fine.

A CPU that supports Intel 64 (on Intel) or AMD64 (on AMD) is backwards compatible with i386. Intel's other 64 bit platform, IA-64 (Itanium), is NOT backwards compatible with IA-32 (i386). But this isn't an Itanium system.
 
The i386 version will work just fine on a modern Intel 64 CPU. That's the whole point of those 64 bit extensions. It's not the ideal version to run, I can agree on that, but it'll work just fine.

A CPU that supports Intel 64 (on Intel) or AMD64 (on AMD) is backwards compatible with i386. Intel's other 64 bit platform, IA-64 (Itanium), is NOT backwards compatible with IA-32 (i386). But this isn't an Itanium system.
Good info. Just trying to figure it out; seems like OP has covered all the other bases I could think of. I remember having trouble booting an amd64 installer on an i386 machine, but probably never tried it going in the other direction.
 
I remember having trouble booting an amd64 installer on an i386 machine
That definitely doesn't work, that's correct. But you should be able to run i386 code on a Intel 64 (AMD64) CPU. You still have all the limitations of i386 though, like the 4GB limit (without PAE).
 
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