Having boot trouble with my PC lately

[lukethack]

Motherboard: Soyo Dragon K7V + KT266A
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1700
Video: 3DFX Voodoo3 3000 AGP
OS: Windows XP Pro
BIOS: Award not sure of the version

I built this computer myself about 6 months ago. It has ran very well and I am happy with it. Lately I have been downloading a lot of large files and leaving it on all night. After you turn it off and then come back later and try to turn it on it will beep one time and then do a long continuous beep and go off. It has been where you could try it 3 or 4 times and then it would finally work. Today it would not come on at all until I turned off the power switch on the back of the power supply until I saw the led go out by the CMOS battery. Something else that I thought was strange since I built it is that it will beep 3 times before the video will come up. It has done that since I first put it together. There are 3 slow beeps and then one more that sounds a little different when the video comes on. Does that sound normal. The beeps are not fast it is like beep pause for about a second beep pause for the the same length of time and beep again. Then the last beep doesn't seem to follow the same pattern it is more like the beep you would here when you first start any pc. I am not and have not ever overclocked this machine. All fans work fine I don't think I have a heat problem. I am not sure what the problem is. If anyone has any information please let me know!

Luke

[The_Shafer]

First thing is first:
What type of BIOS do you have? It might say in the motherboard manual, and if you don't have that, look on the motherboard for a large chip with a sticker that says something like 'Award BIOS' or something of the sort. When you know what BIOS you have, you can look up the beep codes online to tell what the heck that computer is telling you exactly.

I would do a couple of things first. You can always reseat your cards. This doesn't always fix the problem, but it's saved me many a times from tearing a computer apart, or sitting at it for hours trying to figure out what happened.

Also, when you find out what BIOS type you have and what the beep codes are saying (maybe your RAM is goofed? Video card doesn't like something? who knows.) then you can move from there and might be able to treat that specific device.

I hope this helps you get started on fixing your computer. :)

The_Shafer@hotmail.com

The_Shafer :D

[richard_cocks]

Try reseating the vid card and the RAM, I think the on-off beeping is usually missing ram (I am actually guilty of foretting to put my ram back in after doing something once :rolleyes:) so it may be that your ram or vid card has come unseated.

[AllGamer]

The first step in any troubleshooting is to turn off ACPI in the BIOS, and then specify each IRQ for each device, and do not share the IRQ.

[lukethack]

I tried to reseat the Video card and it didn't help. I disconnected the power and cleared the cmos settings. It fire back up and it now gets no error messages and runs fine. I must have enable something in the bios that the card couldn't handle. Thanks for your help!

Luke

[The_Shafer]

Is everything a ACPI problem to you AllGamer? :r

The_Shafer@hotmail.com

The_Shafer :D