Hi, I'm writing a long response because I know that getting the right keywords will help others find this answer (I've also posted this answer elsewhere). This solution worked for me, but of course, your mileage may vary. Scroll to the bottom for the TLDR cause and solutions.
Anyway, I just had this problem happen to the 2 laptops that my daughter and I use. When we tried to turn on our laptops, they would intermittently start. At times pressing the power button would bring the PCs to boot up, other times they would fail and all we'd get is a blinking HDD led. If the laptops manage to boot into windows, a restart would probably cause it to fail into the hdd led blinking no start state. I tried removing the battery, power supply, hdd, ram, disconnecting the keyboard/touchpad, display, WiFi, etc on my laptop. This only seemed to help it start properly once. After that, the problem came back when I restart, or shutdown and try to power on. Leaving the laptops alone for 10 minutes or more before trying to power them on seemed to work as well. The longer the duration the better.
Questioning my daughter, I realised that our laptops developed this problem after we had both used them on battery power till the laptops ran out of power.
That's when I remembered that both our laptops had hibernation disabled. Because both laptops had smaller SSDs, I didn't want hibernate to use the limited storage on the laptops...
THE CAUSE:
- Laptops had hibernation disabled.
- Critical battery power state had triggered windows to try to enter hibernation.
- Laptops were not able to load hiberfil.sys (corrupted?) at power on, resulting in the blinking HDD led instead of booting into Windows.
Choose one solution:
SOLUTION A: GIMME HIBERNATE!
- Re-enable hibernation.
*Update: It has occurred to me that it is possible for PCs with hibernation enabled to have this problem if hiberfil.sys was corrupted (e.g. complete power off due to zero battery power while the ram was being saved to hiberfil.sys). If this is the case, you will need to set a higher percentage of battery power left in your advanced power settings for critical battery state.
SOLUTION B: I DON'T LIKE HIBERNATE!
- Change ALL the advanced power settings (Balanced, High performance, etc..):
... Expand sleep->hibernate after: Set On battery and Plugged in to NEVER
... Expand battery, ensure that none of the actions for critical or low battery is set to hibernate.
... If hiberfil.sys exists, as admin at command prompt, enter: powercfg -h off