Fast blinking cursor when restarting & powering up

Not sure where I should have posted my problem but I have Windows XP installed on my Toshiba laptop and I thought I would start here.
Here is my problem:
I left my laptop on (with lid closed and sleeping) for I guess a day. I raised the lid and it came out of sleep mode but would not really respond well to what I wanted to do, so I did a restart. It went into the process of restarting but then just immediately the screen changed to just a rapid blinking cursor. I could not get it to do anything after that, so I held my power on button to power off, let it sit for a while and powered up again.
All the laptop did was show the Toshiba logo and then go directly to the fast blinking cursor again. Once again I powered off then back on while quickly pressing the F2 key . . . the result was that the logo just remained on the screen but when I pressed any key, it went back to the rapid blinking cursor.

Did my hard drive die?

Thanks, Karen

 

It might well be deceased.

I searched for blinking cursor at Toshiba (Ask Iris), from a quick scan, could only see this:
http://askiris.toshiba.com/ToshibaS...sliceId=&dialogID=7407288&stateId=0 0 7403545

When I was helping with a similar problem for a HP laptop, there were suggestions of reseating the RAM module/s, checking the power supplies (AC and battery), etc.

The "blinking cursors" I have come across have not proved to be a bad HDD. As mentioned, check in the BIOS (read in the User Guide) and find out what HDD diagnostics might be available.

If you have a full version of Windows (XP or 2000), boot to the CD, it will search for an installation of Windows.

Matt

 

If the HDD died, the BIOS message would complain that there is no system disk on computers I've dealt with. Just a blinking cursor means windows can't start for some reason, i.e. may need a repair or reinstall.