Black Screen with cursor on upper left

[csnorman]

I have a toshiba laptop. Was brought to me with just a black screen with cursor flashing on top left. Is this a bad hard drive?

 

[noidea_77]

Any display from the bios before that? When the hdd is bad, it should ask for a proper boot device. Only the cursor sounds more like memory or cpu error.

 

[csnorman]

From what I looked up thus far, for a toshiba, looks like the cmos could be bad. I did notice that the time in the bios was wrong so I corrected it but still goes into a cursor state.