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Lenovo ThinkPad shows only blinking cursor in upper left of screen at start up, can get to bios. Please help.

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Quick resolution: the blinking cursor in the upper-left was caused by a camera media card left in the laptop’s multi-card reader; removing that card allowed the ThinkPad to boot normally. reported the fix, which matches a common firmware behavior where an empty or non‑bootable removable device can be chosen ahead of the internal disk and produce a blank cursor when no bootloader is found.

Why this happens: many built‑in card readers enumerate as USB mass storage (sometimes shown in the boot menu as a USB/“multi‑card” device). If the firmware is set to try removable devices before the internal HDD, the system can attempt to boot from the card reader and fail even though the hard disk itself is healthy. ’s suggestion that the MBR/boot sector can also cause a similar symptom remains correct for cases where removing media doesn’t help; ’s recommendation to have a Windows repair disk is also good practice.

Practical notes and checks (concise):

  • Remove all USB sticks, cards and external drives first; a successful boot after that confirms the removable media was the cause.
  • Make the internal drive the first boot device in BIOS (or disable USB/card reader boot) to prevent recurrence.
  • If the machine still won’t boot, use a Windows 7 System Repair/Recovery disk or USB to run Startup Repair and, from Command Prompt, the usual recovery commands such as bootrec /fixmbr, bootrec /fixboot and bootrec /rebuildbcd; run chkdsk /f if needed.
  • If the internal drive is not showing in BIOS, run the vendor diagnostics again and check the physical connection; if detection is intermittent, treat it as potential hardware failure and secure a backup.

Prevention: keep removable media out when rebooting, set sensible boot priority in BIOS, and keep a recovery USB or system repair disc and current backups for quick recovery.

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Member Avatar for tje210

sounds like textbook hard drive failure. i would try booting to a disk (my preference is the simple win98 boot disk) and doing a fixmbr and fixboot, then try booting again. there are a couple other commands like that to try too, but those are the ones i remember off the top of my head.

Member Avatar for Whopper Dawg

sounds like textbook hard drive failure. i would try booting to a disk (my preference is the simple win98 boot disk) and doing a fixmbr and fixboot, then try booting again. there are a couple other commands like that to try too, but those are the ones i remember off the top of my head.

Ran hard drive the Levono bios hard drive diagnostics and the hard drive checked out fine, no problems. Windows 7 came installed on the machine so I can't reinstall or try to boot from CD.

When the computer tries to boot, I can hit enter to stop the normal boot process. When I do I have the following options -

F1 - which takes you to bios Setup Utility.

The options there are
- Config
- Date/Time
- Security
- Startup
- Restart
- HDD diagnostic program

I have poked around and everything looks OK to me, but I am a novice. I ran the HDD diagnostic program and the hard drive passed the test.

F12 - which takes you to a Boot Menu.

The options in the Boot Menu are:

1. USB HDD Generic - Multi-Card-(USB 2.0)
3. ATA HDDO: ST93203325AS-(S1)
4. ATAPI CDO: HL-DT-STDVDRAM GT30N-(S2)
5. PCI LAN: Realtek Boot Agent

<Enter Setup>

There is no 2.


Looking for what to do now.

Thanks,

Whopper

Member Avatar for tje210

Idk what the diagnostics checked out, but the drive can be fine and still have a bad win7 boot sector. Maybe even a bad mbr.

Member Avatar for Whopper Dawg

How about this?

I asked my daughter is she had done anything to the PC,and she had put the media card from my camera into the OC. I took that out, and everything worked fine.

Thanks for the input.

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