This weekend I went to Fry's and bought parts to build a Myth box. I assembled most of it, but since I don't have a monitor I had to wait until today when I could borrow one. Of course when I turned it on I just got a bunch of repeated beeps.
Now, any PC enthusiast can probably tell you that beep codes tend to mean one of few things. No ram, no video, stuff like that. Of course, the manual for the DFI did not list the beep codes. The board I bought requires PC3200 ram. I bought generic RAM, and an OEM Radeon that had looked pretty poorly put together once I got it out of the box. Online I found some references to the beep codes for video error, even though it did not appear to be the beep code I was hearing. Since I couldn't find anything else I decided to replace the card with an NVidia card that was done by a slightly better known manufacturer. Same thing. Then I found out the system BIOS is by Award, so I was able to find its beep codes, and of course the beep code I am hearing means bad ram. Oh well, I'll exchange the RAM tomorrow and see what I can do.
The thing that annoys me about the situation has nothing to do with the fact that system couldn't boot. It happens. I don;t even care that I was reduced to listening to beeps. The fact that there was nothing in the manual (which does have a totally useless troubleshooting section) Is what annoys me. There is actually a DIMM status LED on the board. If they mad that blink or something I might have guessed the RAM was the issue (it and the video card were my two biggest suspects. Ah well.
Posted by louis at July 7, 2003 10:03 PM | TrackBack