Ok, so I just got a Thinkpad X201, and I'd like to run FreeBSD on it.

I changed the boot order to put USB at the top, and disabled quick boot.

I then used unetbootin to create a usb drive that I could install the OS from.

However, when I boot the laptop it just tries to go into the Windows 7 setup. I tried hitting F12 and manually specifying the USB drive, and it still just ends up at the windows setup.

Is there something I'm missing? I'm kind of getting worried... this is an issue that would effect installing any sort of alternate OS... I could live with installing Ubuntu or something instead, this was mostly a spur of the moment thing, but I need to solve this issue to install _any_ sort of non-windows OS, so I'm hoping someone has some ideas so my $1300 laptop does not end up a paperweight...

Edit: Also, I tried both the unetbootin preset for FreeBSD, as well as the .iso from their website, neither worked.

First off, have you had the chance to test this on another computer? Will your laptop boot from a live CD or DVD? I have not owned that model Thinkpad but I have had over 6 different models over the years and never had this problem. At one time I did have a problem with the Ubuntu Live CD on an older A21m but got around it by using the alternate CD which worked fine.
On the other hand I have no experience with FreeBSD which might be different. You might get some good advise by checking out the ThinkWiki website. They have a lot of info on the different makes and models of Thinkpads.
Here is the link http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki

Let me know of your results.

Apparently the issue is most likely that I used the cd .img, and not the memstick .img

However, dd is being annoying... I downloaded the memstick image to my main OSX machine, and looked up which entry in /dev it was with diskutil

I then ran "dd if=~/Documents/Downloads/8.0-RELEASE-i386-memstick.img of=/dev/disk2" and it seems to be working... USB's light is blinking, but I have yet to be returned to a command prompt and there's no progress indicator, and it seems like the write should not be taking this long... I plan to give it another 20 minutes then try using unetbootin on my windows box to write the image instead... unless someone else has a better idea?