Repeated beeps on bootup

[archcommus]

Okay, I have an old system here, check here for the specs, it's the system listed as "Third." I've been letting a friend use it at his place for over a year now, recently he said it's beeping at startup so he brought it over. When it's turned it on, all you get is long repeated beeps and nothing on the screen. The beeps are a little long and drawn out, like BEEEEP *very quick pause* BEEEEP *very quick pause* BEEEEP. I'm pretty sure this means a problem with the video, am I right?

 

[imported_Reck]

You'd have to look at the motherboard manual to know the beep codes. I'm guess it's an asus so they might have that on their website.

 

[archcommus]

Actually it says no DRAM installed or detected.

Wonder if the mem died....

The slowest stick I have here is PC-2100. Could I try that in the A7M266's PC-1600 slots?

 

[Gumby16]

Yes, you can test the board using the PC-2100 stick. You can't hurt your motherboard by installing a faster stick, since it will default to the maximum board speed (in your case, PC-1600 speed). As long as the RAM is 184-Pin DDR, you'll be fine.

I had a memory slot die on a motherboard when I only had 1 stick installed. I just moved the old stick to a new slot and kept on running.

 

[salaku]

I had the similar problem on one of my older systems. It turned out my memory slot went bye bye for some reason. Try your memory stick on another machine. and also try a different memory stick on this system. Good luck.

 

[archcommus]

Thanks for the help, I'll try the 1600 in another slot and my 2100 stick in there tomorrow, will post back.

I know it's been a few days, I've been busy....

 

[archcommus]

Damn this sucks. Actually the stick of memory said PC-2100 on it, I couldn't believe it. So anyway I moved it to the second slot (there's only two), and it started up okay, but at the memory test, instead of reporting how much memory was present, it just threw back a bunch of characters. So I rebooted, it reported memory amount okay, and I got into BIOS. It was set to the 1050 MHz default, so I changed it to the 1400 MHz default, which is 133x10.5, and it froze in BIOS before I had the chance to save and exit. Every time I'd get into BIOS it'd freeze while I was doing something. Then, all of a sudden, the next time I rebooted, it gave me the long, repeated beeps again.

Now what? Could bad memory have caused it to freeze in BIOS like that? But then why did it work okay in slot 2 initially?

 

[salaku]

Pull your memory sticks out. Clear your CMOS and put memory sticks back in and try again.