Toshiba Laptop locked into Hibernate during boot

The ram idea sounds like it should work, though I've not tried it. The hiberfil.sys stores the active contents of ram and if the installed ram is too small I would expect it to invalidate the hibernation file.

I'm not sure that resetting the bios would have any effect. Whether it resumes from hibernation or does a cold boot is determined by what's on the HDD, not any bios setting. I have in the past hibernated a laptop, swapped out its drive for another to do tests (like a clean install). When I returned the original HDD and powered up it resumed from hibernation as if nothing had happened.

There is a very useful tool here on this forum....

Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk

This is a bootable Windows environment that can be put on a usb. You could boot from that as a way to copy your important files off the PC onto another usb. You could also use a Linux Live usb for the same purpose if you prefer.

...it looks like I will begin the 'refresh your PC' and hope it dont go up in flames,

If you use the built-in 'Refresh this PC' function you'll loose all installed apps, including any OEM utilities. A better approach would be an in-place repair install which keeps all installed apps and files.

Repair Install Windows 10 with an In-place Upgrade

Meacenas said:

I am at this point, (since I have another computer) contemplating just removing the Toshibas harddrive, recovering my files, then formatting the drive and starting over. Would the win 10 license still apply if I just did a fresh install?

Yes. the digital license is stored on Microsoft's activation servers and tied to the unique hardware ID of the PC. Crucially, the HDD plays no part in the hardware ID (you could swap in another HDD or even put in an SSD if you like).

Providing you install the edition the PC has a license for (Home or Pro) it will activate automatically as soon as it contacts the activation servers.

Meacenas said:

...I popped it all back together and hit the power button to find that I was in the BIOS setup screen. YAY ! That means that a usb recovery is possible with a different boot sequence. However, before I get all crazy with switching things around, I thought it would be a good idea to ask you,
... as soon as I exited BIOS setup, it went right back to the hibernation circle...

. ...is it possible to turn off the hibernation in BIOS?

I don't think so. But now you can get the bios screen booting from usb should be possible. The simplest way to kill hibernation is just to delete the hibernation file.

Boot from a recovery drive or an install usb, find your way to Advanced Settings, Troubleshoot and run the Command prompt. Your Windows C: drive will NOT be C: at the moment as you didn't boot from it. Some other letter will have been assigned, so you'll have to look for it. Mine ended up as E: (yes, I'm running through the procedure on another laptop as I type).

To delete the hibernation file I used these commands:

CD E:
DIR /A:H
(just to check I'm on the right drive, the /A:H is required because hiberfil.sys is a hidden file)
DEL /A:H hiberfil.sys
(ditto, the /A:H)

At this point you can just power down and try booting up from the HDD.

If you successfully boot to Windows, a new hiberfil.sys will have been created. You may want to turn off hibernation for now in case it gets stuck in a loop again. From a Command prompt (Admin) type powercfg /hibernate off