Post beeps of DOOM

RPGC Assistance Forums Technical Support Forum
1

ok, first of all, specs: Phoenix Award BIOS v 6.00PG on an ASUS A8N-SLI mobo, GeForce 6800 XT (SLI disabled), and WinXP pro OS.

I recently got a nasty bluescreen with a fatal error of some sorts that I didn’t keep on there long enough because I freaked out and shut off my pc before it had a chance to do something like say, explode. (I recently had to replace a chassis fan again, because I’m good at killing them.) After I booted, there were 2 long post beeps, and I can’t find out what they freaking mean. I suspect it may be a video or memory issue since the error message said something about turning off shading to save memory, but I dunno. @_@

Any ideas, guys?

2

Shot in the dark, but for post issues you may wish to try these tricks.

  1. Unplug the pc power cord, hold the power button on the tower in for 1 solid minute (pull out the battery for laptops. This technique is called “flea power” and it drains the capacitors and temporary memory on the motherboard)

If that fails, try these steps in this order:

  1. Try turning on the PC with only 1 RAM stick in at a time to determine if one is faulty.

  2. try a different video card. (I keep a semi-defective card myself as a tester, it only fails to do 3d afterall :wink:

should all those fail, replace both the motherboard and power supply (as it can sometimes be one shorting the other out)

These steps will work for beep code type issues.

Oh, if you can access the BIOS (delete key for ASUS, f2 for Dells, dunno about others) you can try resetting it to factory defaults. That may solve the issue without replacing anything also.

3

If your fans die so easily, maybe you have a dust problem? Dust killed my other 2 computer’s cpu fan and killed my last computer’s graphics card fan

4

2 post beeps indicates that it is error code “10” (ie 2) that is causing the failure. In this case that means the 2nd item in the POST test.

The reference manual is, in fact, useless for anything technical (makes me sad, ASUS used to do great manuals) but a quick search indicates that 2 beeps is indicative of:

2 - Parity error in base memory (first 64 KiB block)

Which means a cactus motherboard, basically, unless that’s not referring to the onboard 64 KiB but instead to the first referenced block of 64 KiB, in which case it’s cactus RAM. Anyway, cycle through having only one RAM stick in the system and see if you have any luck. I’m pretty sure that’s the motherboard that is dead, though.

Edit: That is to say, test having each RAM stick in there individually to see if one of them is to blame.