weird beeping sound (no POST)

[speedracerX]

Hi, my friend has a P2-233 (he doesn't know what brand or anything) and when he powers up his computer he heres this weird beeping sound. There's one higher pitch one and a lower pitched one and they just keep repeating. It basically sounds like an alarm. His system won't POST and he sees nothing on the screen. Can anyone give any advice on what might cause this to happen?

 

[AndyHui]

A POST alarm usually indicates a hardware error.

You would need to know the brand of the system, or the motherboard model in order to diagnose the beep code.

 

[dkozloski]

Two tone beeping is a system hardware monitor alarm. Since nothing works it sounds like the cpu cooling fan is either not turning or is plugged into the wrong header.

 

[bacillus]

look here if you know which bios that board has to find out what the beeps mean!

 

[corkyg]

The two-tone wailing beeps (like a European police car) are associated with a power/voltage problem.

I had that and the cure was easy . . . a newer, bigger power supply.

But, it also pays to check out what is running and not running (fan wise) and remove some extra stuff. See if it will boot w/o beeping in a bare bones config . . . just HDD and video card to monitor. Unplug everything else.

If that works, a power supply replacement is indicated.

Did he recently add some new hardware?

 

[speedracerX]

no new hardware recently ... but it is a pretty old computer. i'll be heading over after work to see if i can figure it out. he doesn't know what kind of bios he has though.

i'll check the power/voltage thing after work today. thanks for all the great advice 🙂

 

[CTho9305]

reseat the RAM & cpu while you're at it...