Flashing cursor

[harrycovert]

Switched laptop on [ Thinkpad T450 running Win 10 ] Black screen with flashing cursor in top left corner of screen .Tried removing battery but laptop remained switched on must be second battery? .Is there anything I can try[ not to technical ] before I bin it ?

[eeLee]

is it completely powered down? What happens if you hold down the power button for 20 seconds? Is there a hole in the bottom to force a reset?
it does not sound good, possibly main/logic board if it is not getting to POST. It's been a while since I touched one of these though, they are fairly robust.

[Baldchap]

What happens if you get a dead CMOS battery these days? Do things attempt to POST or just do nothing?

[ARHarh]

Black screen with flashing cursor would point to the fact the bios cannot see the OS. So hard drive failed or disconnected. wrong boot disk selected. So enter bios and check the drive is showing up, and set the drive to being the first boot device, if you can't enter bios try replacing the cmos battery as suggested earlier.

[droopsnoot]

I used to get this on a machine that would lose boot sectors from time to time. Boot from emergency boot disk / recovery disk and rewrite boot sector. Mine wasn't a Windows OS, I don't know the exact terminology for doing it in Windows.