Black screen after POST; persists for over 4 minutes

Hello,
(This is my first time posting here, so sorry if this is the wrong section or anything)

Tachyon-PC is being slow to boot its OS. Ironic, right?

Lately my laptop has been experiencing a problem when I boot it up. After the "Toshiba: Leading Innovation" POST screen, a black screen pops up that lasts for 4 minutes, 20 seconds on average. This black screen has a grey underscore (_) in the top-left corner, like a terminal. Afterwards, the Windows 7 splash and then login screen will appear as normal.

-I went into BIOS and set my boot to Fast Mode; that didn't help
-I was told to see if the on-die or onboard cache has been disabled; however, on my Satellite L875's BIOS, I can't seem to find an option for it.

Any help would be highly appreciated.
Thank you.

Yes, I'm running BIOS defaults.
And I have a Satellite L875-S7209.

I installed the latest BIOS version (6.80), but that didn't fix the problem completely.
The average of my last 3 recent startup test times (since the BIOS update) was 3 minutes, 39 seconds.

Hi Princee,

It looks like a Power Management issue holding your laptop on black screen for quite a while. Your processor may not be getting adequate power in the Minimum Processor State.

Try this to resolve the issue.

Control Panel > Power Options > in "Balanced" > "Change plan settings" > "Change advanced power settings" > "Processor power management" >" Minimum processor state"

Change it to 100% for both "On battery" and "Plugged in" > Apply > OK

Shut down your computer and then reboot.

Everything OK now?

If your laptop boots now without the black screen, you may try decreasing the Minimum processor state power to such a lower value as to maintain boot without the black screen. So change it to 90, 80, 70 etc, till you get the minimum power required for a perfect boot.

Feed us back on the results after changing it to 100%.

Have a good day.

jumanji, what are the indicators for this? Just black screen flashing cursor after boot for extended time? or can it relate to slow boot as well?

gregrocker said:

jumanji, what are the indicators for this? Just black screen flashing cursor after boot for extended time? or can it relate to slow boot as well?

Yes, black screen flashing cursor for extended time - can be an indication of power-starved processor. Let us wait and see whether it is so in the case of OP.

Can it relate to slow boot as well? - Quite possibly yes. A power-starved processor may not be operating at its full rated speed and may take a longer time to execute the assembly level commands of the OS as it loads, increasing the boot time. This is an intuitive inference but increasing the power levels in case of a slow boot and checking is not a big procedure and I would think that this should always be carried out first before chasing and eliminating other reasons for a slow boot.

Britton30 said:

The processor power states settings will only be enforced with Windows booted, at least I think so.

Let us wait and see the user's feedback.

There may be a low battery or charger not keeping it up all the way.

Then a fully charged battery pack should resolve the problem.