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French Ambulance??

D

Double Trouble

Elite Member
I put together a system for a friend a couple of years ago using an MSI 6163 ver 1.0 mobo. Everything's been running fine since then, until this morning, when he turned it on, he says he doesn't get any video and just hears an alarm sound that's best described as the sound of a french ambulance.

I know these mobo's use tones as a diagnostic tool, but I can't find any documentation to tell me what that particular tone means. MSI's website and manual are no help, there is no mention of the tones there.

Usually, an alarm tone like that means the mobo is unable to find the memory or the processor. Anyone out there have any more info on the alarm tones for that particular board, or any ideas on how to find out whether the memory / video card / processor is dead without actually getting my hands on the PC? (he's very very far away ).

Any info on this would be appreciated.
 
Tell him to get on a plane, come to you. This way, you can test the processor / memory / video. Or tell him to buy another machine and test all the stuff in the other machine and then bring that other machine back. Or tell him to f*ck off.
 
Tell him to tell you what it sounds like as far as the number of long and short beeps. Then tell the people here if he can't find it in the manual (the ones I have have what the beep signals mean for mine).
 
The alternating tones mean there is a problem detected by the hardware monitoring section. A fan has stopped, a voltage is out of limits, a temperature is too high, or maybe a sensor has failed.
 
Dkozloski is on target. Just went through that scenario. It is pretty common with certain CPU fans that turn slower than the BIOS RPM threshhold. Just go in and turn all that hardware monioring stuff off in BIOS and then adjust one by one until you can get an OS installed and transfer that function. It can be any of the fans or voltages that are being monitored in BIOS.
 
Thanks for the input.... an update: I can't have him turn off monitoring in the BIOS, because the system doesn't get that far. He doesn't get any video at all. Everything spins up (including the hard drive), and the fans on the processor work fine, but I suspect that either the video card or memory has been zapped. Argh.

The alarm sound is composed of two alternating sounds of equal length continuously sounding......
 
CPU problem. You usually get this "alarm" when the CPU overheats.

I'd have him reseat the CPU, and add another layer of thermal grease/paste between the heatsink and the CPU.
 
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