PC won't boot. Continuous BIOS Beep.

thehomeofDob

Hey guys,

Big problem, and I can't figure it out for the life of me, here's all the details I can think of. I'll start from the beginning. I decided to do a clean out of my case, a bit of reorganising, and cable tidying.

The following was done: took a can of spray air (held vertically so it was just air coming out) to the whole thing, cleaned out fans, heatsinks, the lot. I repositioned the DVD Drive three bays lower, and the HDD - to improve airflow. My power supply has two fans on it, one at the back, and one on the bottom. When I built the machine I put it the wrong way around, the fan was on top and sucking air in from the case roof. So I unplugged the power supply, flipped it around, and reseated all the cables.
Then I organised cables, inc. Case to MB cables - Power Switch, HDD Led, Int. Speaker and Reset Switch.

That's it, job done. Before I continue - MB - Asus P4s533-x, CPU - 3.06Ghz Northwood Socket 478. 1.5GB of DDR Ram. GPU - AGP 6600GT

Now I go to turn it on, and nothing. No signal to the monitor. No beeps, fans spin, HDD spins, nothing on the screen. I change the graphics card, still nothing. I've had this problem with the case to motherboard cables not working correctly, so I take off the HDD Led, and reset switch cables and make sure the Power Switch and the speaker cable are on correctly.
This time, I get the same, but with a three or four second beep, which stops for about a second and then loops.

From there - I reseat everything, I've taken out all PCI cards, I've reseated the ram, the 20 and 4 pin power connecters. Right now, I'm down the bare minimum, I have the PSU, CPU and RAM connected, and in the case. That's it. There are two sticks of ram, I've tried both seperately, in both slots, with the exact same beep. I'm at a loss, the CPU fan spins, but I continue to get the beep. I've gone from everything plugged in, down to just those three.

Please tell me I can't see a very easily fixed problem that's right in front of my eyes. I don't want to spend money on this PC, I'm saving for a new one, but it'll be at least two months before I have sufficiant funds. Any help or troubleshooting advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks guys.

0ubliette

hmm well i hate to say it, but if youre booting from the bare minimum, i.e mobo, cpu and ram only, id hazard a guess and say one of these is faulty, and it could be your mobo.make sure you didnt lose any screws in the case, as screws sitting between mobo and case can cause problems, if all esle fails, slap yopur mobo into a different case and try a minimal boot from there (just cpu, ram mobo)
CHECK AND DOUBLE CHECK that the power button connectors and all those other fiddly connectors are connected properly to your motherboard. If you hae a mobo manual it should tell you there.

SwampThing

All I can suggest is take the mobo out of the case (for ease of access), and try again. If that fails, take out the RAM, try again. Failing that, take out the processor and try again. Just use the Power switch cable from the case to power on the mobo.

If you're down to mobo and PSU, and still no joy, well you've narrowed down the problem - which you'll need to do before spending money anyway.

I've just built a machine that I had proactically fully built only to have to go through what you're doing to discover I had a faulty, brand new OCZ PSU.


A single continuous beep - is that not to do with the processor? Have you reseated that?

Saruman

Can you clear up something for me? You are only conncting the mbd, PSU and CPU & Ram? And you are getting beeps? Well that part is good because you do not have onboard graphics so the system will beep if there is no graphics card.
Put back in the graphics card, if you have an old one try that instead.

You did not pull off any jumpers did you? Anyway if you have the manual.. find the jumper for resetting the cmos and see if that sorts it.

Like i said there has to be a graphics card either on board or a car or you will get beeps. Taking out a graphics card only helps to see fi you get a beep code.. its when you have no beep code that it is usually more serious... as in down to blown CPU or something.

game4it70

here is alink to find out what the beep code means with different bios chips
http://www.amptron.com/html/bios.beepcodes.html

thehomeofDob

Hey guys, back again - got home from work and straigh at the pc. It was late last night, which was the only reason I hadn't take the motherboard out of the case.

I've done so now. Tested with 2 graphics cards, both memory sticks, and the bare minimum of cables - 20 and 4 pin power, CPU fan power, and the int. speaker cable. Used a flat head screwdriver to power on/off as the cable wouldn't reach from the case. Still the same beep, but there's no pattern that I can discern. It's just one 2 or 3 second beep, with a short pause, which loops continuously.
The Asus has a Phoenix BIOS - nothing I can find on that kind of beep code. Looks like I'll have to bring it into work and play around with a different motherboard/power supply. I'm not looking forward to spending money, was planning on a 2grand new PC, I do not want to spend money on this computer.

Thanks for your help guys, all comments very helpful.

hopeful

Phoenix Beep Codes

May be out of date....although was correct with my newish Asus board when I forget to put a graphics card in

::::Edit::::

Was bored so went looking more

Found a PDF from Phoenix with BIOS POST codes and beep codes. May or may not be useful. PDF HERE.

::::Time for bed!::::

thehomeofDob

Woohoo!! Problem solved - sort of.
I went into work today, through process of elimination I discovered it was indeed my ram at fault. It seems like I did not properly discharge myself when I first started work on the PC three days ago. So both sticks of ram got belted with a nice bit of static.
The ram is 2700, Komplett is quoting me 90 for 1GB. Too much for this old bugger of a machine. Luckily I have 320MB of SDRAM that had been laying around, so I've got things up and running at least, until I can afford a new build.
Finally - instead of making a new thread in the windows forum, I'd like to ask, how in the world do I make Windows livable with 320mb of ram? It's screeching to a halt trying to open anything. I'm considering putting in a slave HDD and installing ubuntu, but I'd rather not as I couldn't get my wireless card to work on it last attempt.

Anyway, thanks a million for all your advice.
~Dob

TonyM.

if its sdram 100 i have some i can give you