Help! Sick Computer

scheming_gypsy

take it it's only me who's never experienced hard drive errors causing a post beep?

Toxteth_OGrady

Yeah - your right.

My money's on it being a dead/dying CMOS battery.

In fact I'll wager a :beer: on it.

:cool:

TOG

rogerramjet

Post beep will occur if a HDD is installed or not....it will just have a problem trying to find the drive before moving onto trying to find an operating system to boot.

If it appears to be constantly rebooting it is hardware.....I had a Athlon 2800+ processor system which kept on booting and then restarting, I striped it down to bare system, changed memory and then by chance someone I knew wanted me to build them a system....which meant I had the means to test components with a different system. It turned out the processor was faulty...had it repalced never had a problem since.

On the same point.....A few months ago someone I build a computer for had a similar problem...not the same but similar...processor had become faulty, since it has been changed he's had no probs.

My bet is either hard drive or processor..as it appears to keep rebooting. if you have another system put the win 98 OS drive into the puter you have the problem with if it boots ok (will go through the found new hardware bit) then try shutting down and restarting a good few times to see if does the same as it did with the XP OS.

Only try the XP drive in your other system if they are virtually identical as XP doesn't like to many hardware changes in one go if it has problems booting the HDD will be identifed as the problem

slobbery

Thanks everyone for your suggestions - will try them all out in the next couple of days and see what happens next. Have spent most of today setting up my xbox 360 to stream from my media centre pc (works fantastically even though both are on the older wireless type network and 360 manual says it won't stream live tv) so am now totally fed up with all things technical and going to go and drink beer....

slobbery

Update -
As far as I can work out it appears to be a problem with the memory slot on the mobo. Moved memory around to free slot and have had no problems all day, and hdd health now gives me no "date of death".
Fingers crossed everything is all sorted.
Thanks again to everyone who helped.

scheming_gypsy

scheming_gypsy wrote:

easy starter... unplug the hard drive, disable in BIOS and switch on. See if you get the beeps. If you do then it ain't the hard drive. Never seen a hard drive cause the system to beep, i'd be looking more to a memory problem myself.

cough cough