Confusing "beep" codes on P4P800 mobo (AMI BIOS)

[Tachion]

My computer has been wonky for the past few months now. I decided to give it another reformat to see if it might help, and when trying to install Windows the system would either blue screen or say it couldn't find any hard drives. Most of my problems had been hard drive related, so it wasn't surprising. I ran all the necessary tests on the drives, and they all reported no errors, yet I got the same problems when I tried again.

I decided to let the system sit for a few days and try it again. Now, it won't even boot at all. When I turn it on, it immediately lets out 2 beeps, followed by 6 beeps. Nothing on the screen or anything else (not even power to the keyboard).

Basically, it does this: beep beep *pause* beep beep beep beep beep beep

I looked up the beep codes for the AMI BIOS (which I'm pretty sure my board has), and it says 2 beeps means a memory failure, and 6 beeps means a "8042 Gate A20 failure" (basically a mobo or CPU failure).

I'm guessing it's a mobo failure, since I was having problems with the hard drives and other stuff, and I was doing processor intensive things right up until the system died.

Any thoughts/comments? Is it the mobo? Or something else? Nothing hardware-related has changed from when it was working a few months ago up until now, so I can't imagine what else it could be.

Thanks.

 

[drjman]

sounds like a motherboard. Make sure you find the beep codes for your motherboard, not necessarily for the BIOS. They may mean different things. Also double check to see if the CPU, memory and cards are seated properly (just to be sure).
When you install XP, one thing to keep in mind is that until SP2 (or SP1 i think) XP did not support installing on SATA drives. Make sure you have a XP SP2 disk if not you can make a slip stream version with SP2. google Nlite to find a great program to slipstream.

 

[Tachion]

Ok, now this is interesting.

Just turned it on again and it booted, but told me the CMOS time/date are incorrect, which is strange.

Meh. I'm convinced it's the mobo and it's on it's last leg. It's definitely not the hard drives, because I've swapped them, ran extensive test, etc.

I have a feeling I just need to scrap this machine with all the problems I've had recently. It's 5 years old, anyways.

 

[drjman]

better safe than sorry, get a new mobo. The second my stuff starts acting weird on its own it gets tossed into the trash heap.