I own a Toshiba laptop and it has stopped booting up and when it does, which is rare and very slow I receive a message "cmos battery failure" Would that be the cause of this problem?
Flat CMOS battery shouldn't cause a problem booting, it just won't save your Bios settings when you switch it off. Run memtest86 if you want to rule out memory as a problem.-if you can get it to boot.
The cmos batteries main function is to save the date and time.