Hey guys, Whilst trying to work out what precisely is up with my housemates PC, I decided to upgrade my RAM on my computer, having been given a perfectly tidy 512 meg stick of DDR RAM from my brother's (AFAIK) defunkt Athlon rig. I install the stick, lock it in, turn the pc on, hard drives spin up, and constant bleeping happens. nothing displays on the monitors, and it won't work. i remove the stick of RAM, and it continues to have this issue. Any ideas? Please for the love of Jesus and dead puppies don't tell me I've got to replace my mobo... Joe
Reset the CMOS first (instructions should be in the manual), if that doesn't work then you can afford to panic a little
Perhaps somehow the other RAM stick became partially disconnected? Thats happened to me before and its terribly annoying (the RAM gets hot real fast) so just check that out. Also check all the other connections in the PC just to make sure nothing jiggled loose.
The cause may be all the memory not being the same speed, it should work, but my nForce2 board wouldn't accept a DDR333 and a DDR400 module at the same time.
would that then cause the pc not to start up again Gravemind? As for the mobo manual, it's a crappy Packard Bell, I have no mobo manuals. Plus I'm not too confident with messing around with anything to do with the BIOS... Joe
Just boot into BIOS and select the option to revert everything back to failsafe/default settings, save and exit, restart and see if that helps. Else try moving your ram into another slot.
m0o0oeh, yes it did, wouldn't even display the BIOS screen, i had no speaker hooked up, but I expect it would have been beeping. To reset the BIOS, there are 2 ways of doing it without getting into the BIOS. First is to find the clear CMOS jumper, which resets to default when you power on. The other is to unplug it and take out the CMOS battery, which will reset the BIOS due to lack of power, and the put it in and boot.
I'm not entirey sure about that one, I once had a motherboard that warned against it as it would cause damage; instead you were to move the jumper to the second position for a few seconds, revert it and then boot. Might be worth trying that one first, just to be on the safe side.
Right. Thanks for your advice so far chaps. I won't attempt resetting the BIOS tonight as I'm far too tired, and I know I'll make a mistake. So, first thing tomorrow morning, I'll have a go, and let you know. If I take the battery out, should I leave it out for a while, or is the reset fairly instantaneous? Thanks, Joe
Yeah, completely unplug the PC and then remove the battery, leave it out for a good 15 mins just to be sure. Might be overkill, but you'll know it's certain. Good luck with it
I'm curious what else you could do with it? The whole point of the jumper is to move it to the second position for a few seconds and then switch it back. Exactly what behavior did your manual warn against?
You're exactly correct in saying that, but I was referring to this post: Which implies booting the PC with the jumper in the clear position (what my manuals always said to avoid). However, I'm sure I've read of some motherboards using that system to clear the CMOS, but have never actually came across one personally.
Ah, fair enough. I hadn't looked at the original post that way, since you didn't quote that part of it.
right then, now i'm starting to panic. I removed the battery from the mobo for half an hour. Then, I put the battery back in. It still spins up and makes that god-awful bleeping sound. Apart from resetting the bios via jumpers, is there anything else I can do? I reseated the RAM, that's all good, everythings connected up right, I just don't know what else to do. Argh! Joe
It's a Gigabyte GA 8S648FXM2, running a P4 3GHz/3.2GHz. Joe ::EDIT:: How could it be a defunkt PSU? It powers up and the hdd's spin up, dvd drives whir to life, so I dunno... J
Sounds like memory maybe. Try with one stick only then swap with another and try etc. Also, try to find the clear BIOS jumper. It'll likely be labeled CCMOS or something and it'll be three pins with a jumper covering two of them.
would that be right next to the battery airchie? I tried putting in a DIMM that looked almost exactly the same, but the second one i tried is PC3200? The one in my system hasn't got that on its sticker. Joe
The Motherboard draws more power and different voltages to the hard drives, if it has 2 12V rails one may be FUBAR
