PC shut down with loads of beeps, now won't boot

[ColonelBlimp]

Specs
C45-770
Phenom 965 stock
Cm 212 evo+ cooler
4x2gb generic ddr3
Xfx r9-280x (new)
Corsair rm650 gold PSU (new)

Fitted my new PSU and video card yesterday (PC wouldn't boot until I'd reset CMOS)
Once it was running I played a bit of crysis3 and an hour of bf3 and then quit. Was checking the temps on hwmonitor before going to bed ( phenom was at 46 degrees after bf3, 28 degrees on idle) when suddenly the computer just shut down and made a lot of beeps, no pattern to them just lots of short ones.
Pressed power on this morning and get motherboard lights (4 blue ones) and the fans go round but no signal to monitor and can't hear any HD activity.No beeping this morning either.
Best guess?
My PC is in a quite inaccessible place so troubleshooting is a bit of a pain and I'd like some idea before I go unhooking everything!

 

[Carfax83]

Check your motherboard manual to see what the multiple consecutive beeps means.. I'm thinking something isn't connected or seated properly..

 

[Morbus]

My father's old computer (P4 3.0GHZ) had this exact same issue. I threw it in the garage for scrap and bought him a new tower... It wasn't the VGA, that's for sure, and I doubt it was the CPU. My guess is the motherboard crapped out after 10+ years of service... Would like to hear about your problem if you find a solution.

 

[ColonelBlimp]

Lugged the damn thing downstairs for some light, plugged it in and it booted to BIOS. Still got the checksum error (f1,f2 etc). Chose f2 to load defaults but it had remembered the date and time from yesterday so CMOS battery appears OK.
Proceeded to desktop via startup repair which found nothing.
Nothing in event logs either.
Very odd, am now running chkdsk on all drives and when finished I'm going to shutdown, reseat video card and memory then reboot and loop Unigine Heaven for at least 3 hours.
My odds are currently on the motherboard or dodgy and driver, maybe corrupt BIOS chip?

 

[Brekyrself]

You mentioned a new PSU. I had a similar problem with random crashes and reboots. Turned out the PSU PCIe connecter for the video card burned up. Double check all connections from the new psu.

 

[ColonelBlimp]

Feeling slightly embarrassed now, chkdsk on drive c turned up a few orphan entries so after reboot tried running Unigine Heaven again and got this error,
Aticfx32.DLL is either not designed to run on windows or contains an error

Radeon driver alert!!

So, I did the following,

Uninstalled Catalyst Manager
Rebooted
Removed all AMD entries with Driver Fusion
Rebooted
Installed the latest Catalyst, 13.12 whql
Rebooted
Played Crysis3 for 2 hours, went to bed.
Today I went to see my mother and left Bf4 downloading and updating and all was well when I got back 4 hours later.

Now, I would expect to have to clean out the Radeon drivers if I was changing to a nVidia card but didn't expect to have to do it when changing Radeon to Radeon as it is the same driver!

Am I guilty of a noob error ( though I don't think I'm a noob in these things!)

 

[denis280]

Most of the time it's drivers

 

[alangrift]

I think you might have a slight error from overheating in the mother board my recommendation take out the old hard drive out and take a new one and put it in and reboot the computer off of a disk with windows from a friend and see if that works. If not it's something with the motherboard if so it's the hardrive malfunctioning.

 

[Torn Mind]

A POST card should help determine what exactly is wrong.

There are ones that fit in PCI ports as well; you can use those too.

 

[ColonelBlimp]

Thanks, but the issue is resolved, will bear in mind for next time.

 

[piasabird]

Checksum is often bad RAM.

 

[dawp]

I've run into this issue and apparently you do need to uninstall the old drivers when going from an older generation to a a newer one. I went from an HD 4870x2 to a hd7970 and had the same issue. still have that 4870x2 in my closet, just can't seem to bear to part with it.

just curious, what was the old card?

 

[ColonelBlimp]

I've run into this issue and apparently you do need to uninstall the old drivers when going from an older generation to a a newer one. I went from an HD 4870x2 to a hd7970 and had the same issue. still have that 4870x2 in my closet, just can't seem to bear to part with it.

just curious, what was the old card?

Hi Dawp, old card is an ASUS voltage tweak 5770 which served me very well. Building a new PC for my elder brother out of old bits and pieces I've acquired so have stuck it in that. (Q6600 @3ghz, win7 (32bit), 4gb ddr2). I'm trying to get him to try some more modern games than bf1942 and Oblivion.