sound like a dead motherboard?

[kurbn]

Came home today, turned the pc on and all i got was a solid tone "BEEEEEEEEP - 3 second pause - BEEEEEEEEP" and it continues on from the external speakers pluged into the onboard sound card...monitor stays in sleep mode, hdd light not on and only the power light is on.

I unpluged everything from the back of the machine apart from power, unpluged the hard drives

still the same shit... its a pretty old workhorse that I built years ago 2.6gb 800fsb on a ECS 848-P mainboard

suggestions? to me it sounds like a dead mainboard

[DRKWRX]

my old pc did similar when the mother board was fried.

[Lasoya]

motherboard is dead, or not enough volts to startup, if its not overclocked then the motherboard is def dead

[kurbn]

yeh not overclocked..

oh well, 7 years aint bad, could use an upgrade anways

[fsbk]

should be a light on the motherboard (little L.E.D). plug it back in to power and see if it's on. if it's not, it's dead. if it's on means it's ok and is something else.

if you know your way around the computer then take out your graphics card and ram, check there is a good connection (blow on the connectors and put them back in). start it up again and see if it beeps. if it does, disconnect the bios battery, leave it for 5 minutes, then put it back in. this resets the BIOS to default values.

if you aren't confident with doing any of this then i wouldn't recommend it and either take it to a computer store or buy a new one. 7 years is damn good service from a PC :)

[tmz_99]

could be faulty ram or even the video card.
I'd suggest trying a spare card if possible, if you have 2 RAM chips, try one at a time......
Also unplug everything and plug it back together again, could be a dusty connection just not making it.....

depending on the BIOS on your board, have a look at:
http://www.computerhope.com/beep.htm
may also help.

[kurbn]

Yeh i looked to see if the light was on and it wasn't, guess it means game over

i still will try re-setting the bios, computer has been funny recently, keeps dropping the wireless network and power save mode wasnt even on

[kurbn]

hmm bit of a wierd one.. did what you said, removed ram and video and all IDE cables.. plugged vid cable and ram back in after a wipe down.. started up in dos every time..

plugged an IDE cable into the white slot into the motherboard and into a hard drive, started up but No boot drive... pluged second one in.. still no boot drive... swapped IDE cable into the blue slot on the motherboard with both hard drives connected.. wouldnt start again.. got the beeeep. Unpluged the hard drives and cables all together... still going BEEEEEEEP

yet still no light... wonderin if perhaps I have a cracked solder point somewhere on the board and puting the cards back in has reconected it, then screwing around with the IDE outputs on the board has made it loose conection.. well thats my theory

[Mistikal]

Just do what I used to do - completely disassemble the PC (motherboard out of the case, etc) and put it all back together.

Works 99% of the time for me.

Also, do a search on Google for the beep codes of your motherboard. The manufacturer may still have an online copy of the manual for it.

[tmz_99]

What Mistikal said - take it apart, put it together... :)

could be IDE bus or the cables themselves... have you got a CD drive and HDD running off the same IDE cables? Try one drive on one cable at a time.. it could even be a problem with the master/slave system on the CD drive, Ive had instances where I've had to swap the CD to a different IDE cable, god only knows why this worked.