motherboard beeps

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Good morning all, I hope I can explain my problem correctly. A friend gave me 2 computers that I would like to fix up for my 90 year old Mom and a 80 year old uncle. Mom and my uncle only want read e mail and surf the net nothing fancy.
The computers are from my friends IT dept. and they have no hard drives and integrated graphics, speed 1.8 Celeron chips.
I have two hard drives laying around both 20 gigs, and various cd drives. Ok here is the problem.
The first one I hooked up works fine, the second one when started there is a little speaker of some sort on the mother board right next to the ribbon wire for the hard drive that beeps, I get nothing on the the monitor to see what kind of bios setup it has. The monitor comes on with a green light and almost immediately goes to the yellow sleep mode. Any information would be appreciated, thank you

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Hi Jim and welcome to the lounge!

We need a little more information before we can give any sort if useful answer I’m afraid. The speaker that you mentioned will give a single beep if everything is okay during POST (Power On Self Test) but will give different beep sequences if there is a problem.

Unfortunately, there is no ‘standard’ beep sequence definition as different BIOS/mobos will give different beeps for the same problem. Really we need to know what the make & model of your motherboard is (this can often be found by checking the motherboard directly and googling for any serial numbers or model numbers that you find).

Good luck!

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Jim,
As Lyra said, we need more info if possible.
Can you get into the BIOS at all to see if the HD is being recognized at all?
Depending on the BIOS type, you can usually get into BIOS by repeatedly pressing F1, Del, F1, Del, etc during the boot sequence. Then on the initial screen you can at least see if the HD is seen properly by the system.
I assume you have also checked the drive jumpers on the back of the HD to see if it is set to the “primary” setting not secondary or select.

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Thanks Lyra & Bob I checked the mobo and all i can find is it’s a ASUS but no model # or Rev. like the other one. I found a white tag with alot of # msa0311108-02811-mbl78h-a01
But like I said as soon as I try to boot the monitor goes yellow, thanks again

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Oh and the little beeping thing has ac-1205g on it and a plus sign in a circle

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(Edited by skitterbug on 26-May-06 14:09. Added a link)

What is the sequence of the beeps? 1 long, 2 short or 3 short, etc?

Added: The first paragraph on on this page might help you locate the complete model number of your board. Hope it helps.

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Jim,
Have you tried to get into the BIOS?
See my post above.

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Thanks for that- I’ve had a quick look but can’t find anything with that ref you gave. Can you speak to your IT friend and find out if he knows what the mobo model is, or failing that, what CPU socket and mobo chipset it uses?

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When you mention the LED for the monitor going to the yellow colour almost immediately, I’d imagine that there’s a problem with the video card / port on the computer. If you have a spare one laying around, pop that in and give it a try.

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Thanks everyone, Skitter it is one long beep.
Cris yes I tried an old video card no luck, I think the mobo is shot, would it be worth it to save anything from this case?
I guess I’ll have to ask my friend for another one, he said they had a lot of them.

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Just curious about whether you had any extra memory modules that you could try swapping them out? Sometimes a long beep indicates bad memory. If your friend has “lots more”, maybe that would be the easier way to solve your problem though!

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Thanks again, yes I tried another stick of memory no luck. I’ll try a new box.

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would it be worth it to save anything from this case

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[/indent]That really depends on whether or not you have any use for it. Without another system to plug the parts into, you would only be working on expanding your “parts pile” (I speak from experience). It’s not bad to have the parts around, but there are two problems with this: one, questionable heritage… you could wind up with something that is on its way out in an otherwise flawless system. Two, things become obsolete quickly and you may wind up with a bunch of parts that you can no longer use. Need any matched pairs of EDO RAM?

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