PC Advice please
 

For some strange reason my other PC has decided that it dosn't want to play anymore. I use it mainly for dvd burning and gaming.

The first sign of trouble was a few days ago when it failed to recognise the second HDD thats in there, now it just wont boot up.

As soon as I press the power button I get a long beep followed by two short beeps from the onboard speaker... and thats it !!

I've reset the cmos and diconnected the second HDD to see if I could get it to boot up, but its still not playing.

Any Advice what to try next would be appreciated

Phil

Remove your memory and re-seat it, likewise with your cpu.

You ideally should look up the beep code in your mboard's manual to get an idea what the problem is.

Also you could try unplugging all you drives from power and IDE cables etc, and take out any unecessary hardware (sound cards etc) just to see if it will boot just to the BIOS screen.

i think that code in mine is the graphics card?

yep , checked the codes online and it is the graphics card, does this mean its dying ?

As suggested pull everything out and plug it back in. The graphics card might be on the way out but more likely it is just loose in the edge connector. Reseat the cards, memory etc and you have at least a 50:50 chance of everything coming good again.

I checked that everything was seated correctly and installed my spare graphics card but I'm still getting the same beeping.

not sure what to do now except maybe a stripdown and rebuild with possibly new IDE cables and Power cables.

any more suggestions ??

Phil

Your graphics card may be duff but try cleaning the edge connectors first. Take the card out and use a rubber (a pencil eraser type of rubber before you get any dodgy ideas .... :-) ) to clean off the edge connectors. Blow off the bits BEFORE you replace it. Try it again .....

Cheers

Dave

To interpret your BIOS error beep codes: www.bioscentral.com

If the HDD was failing I would suspect either a bad HDD or failing IDE cable, pull the power and ide cable out of the HDD to see if it will POST. The DMI pool data in the cmos might be corrupted due to the bad HDD or IDE lead you see. So I would clear the CMOS for 30seconds as well, after u pull the the HDD power and IDE out. Those bios error beeps can be misinterpreted sometimes.