K’s PC bit the big one Saturday night. Maybe the mice ate it.
Instead of restarting properly, it would produce a long LOUD beep, pause for a moment to catch its breath, then repeat. Normally, the PC would emit a short friendly beep before initializing the video with all those helpful text messages. Each tone was at an ear wrenching pitch and lasted for something like 6.3 minutes (if we go by the book like Lt. Saavik). Of course the various websites listing the infamous and mysterious BIOS boot codes listed NOTHING related to a single long beep. Previously, after two or three pokes of the little reset button, something would behave as desired and the machine would be up and running.
Not so on Saturday where my troubleshooting efforts went something like this:
Click. Whir. BEEEEEEEEEEEE- Click. Whir. BEEEEEEEEEEEE- Click. Whir. BEEEEEEEEEEEE-, ad naseum
Occasionally, I’d unplug or remove some random PC interior widget (maybe I was a bit more methodical than random) and try this fascinating experiment again.
Click. Whir. BEEEEEEEEEEEE- Click. Whir. BEEEEEEEEEEEE- Click. Whir. BEEEEEEEEEEEE-, ad naseum
Occasionally I’d have a:
Click. Whir. BEEEEEEEEEEEE- Click. Whir. BEEEEEEEEEEEE- Click. Whir. Beep. Whir. Post. Boot. Login. “Ah-hah!” Reset. Whir. BEEEEEEEEEEEE- “Oh.” Click. Whir. BEEEEEEEEEEEE-
Thrown in for variety.
Well I removed one RAM stick, then the other, then put back the first, then swapped the video card then booted without the video card, then without the RAM then without hard drives video card or RAM, and various other permutations. No obvious combination of elements would change the behavior in any consistent predictable way.
And by the end the Click-Whir-Beep-Whir-Post-Boot-Login-Ah-hah!s had pretty much ceased to occur*. So Sunday was “Install all the stuff that K had on her machine but I didn’t have on mine” day. Thankfully, the two machines share the same chassis manufacturer (Antec), so transferring the disks was basically a matter of popping out the enclosure, sliding into the other machine and plugging them in.
So for those keeping score, we’ve lost one WXP P3-2G box. Still kicking are one Linux 486 server, one working WXP P2-850 w/ TV capture, one half working WME Dell laptop and the now full-time family machine: an extra quiet WXP P4-3.4G (which I think really needs that Pentium-D 945 3.4G chip now… twice as many users calls for twice as many CPUs, right? Anyone? Right?)
In reality, we’ll see how this goes, but I see a midrange COTS box in our near future.
February 5th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Yeah, looks like you did all that you could.
The patient isn’t going to make it, doctor.
In good news, CompUSA is going out of business (the one near us closes in twelve days). If you have one near you and hurry you might be able to snap up a good deal.
February 5th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Egads…a 486?? I mean, I know it’s just a simple Linux box, but ….wow.
And I agree with JC above, you did all you could for sure. Hmm, could you get into the BIOS at all? Your issue sounds an awful lot like the one your sister had at one time. I believe that was a temperature issue, bad ’seal’ between heat sink and CPU. Just a thought, although I’m sure you’d have noticed before now if she was running hot.
As far as CompUSA, the one near us (Unless there is one in Caz) closed about 12 months ago.
February 5th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I’ve probably got a spare motherboard of roughly that vintage from the former CHH dedicated server machine. In fact, I could probably send you the entire box…it’s not like it’s doing much these days. Give me a call if you want the specs.