wont boot or display on monitor

petersonlevi88

ok, I build computers, nothin fancy just assembly. I had an hp working fine. I removed the ram and installed the same but 2 512mb instead of 2 2gb stick both ddr2. computer now beeps when turned on, but wont display or boot. I had it sitting in limbo for 2 months untouched. What could be my problem??? I am unfamiliar with this error. pls help....

marc

One long beep and then three beeps in a row? It's not detecting correctly your ram modules. try placing just one and see if it boots

Goineasy9

Just an addition to what Marc posted. I just built a new machine with 4 X 4Gb memory sticks and had a similar error. I had to take the sticks out, one by one, and test them in the first memory slot and, lo and behold, one of the sticks was bad. That may be your problem, or, you might have the sticks in the wrong slots. On my ASUS board, slot 2 was the slot for a single stick. Slots 2 and 4 were for 2 sticks. You might double check your motherboard manual to see if you're using the correct slots.
Also, some motherboards have a list of approved memory. With ASUS, if you don't use memory from their approved list, it may also cause a problem. Something else to look at.

petersonlevi88

ok. thanx guys. Let me clarify on the ram. Both computers were working fine. Both are HP with Phoenix Technologies motherboards. I switched the ram between computers. both are ddr2. They both had stock ram. The 2.4Ghz dual core came with 2 2GB sticks and the 3.0Ghz came with 2 512Mb. The 2.4 only has 2 ram slots and I put both 512Mb sticks straight outta the other working HP in that. I'm gonna try a few things and review the beep code list and will get back to ya and let you know.

petersonlevi88

Ok gents, I tried all the advice to no avail. The beep codes I looked up don't match the codes I'm getting. With the ram is 1 long beep, without is 1 short then 1 long.

Goineasy9

Those beeps don't seem to match up to anything I can find. If they are, in fact, Phoenix brand bios' then they should match something on this link:

http://www.bioscentral.com/beepcodes/phoenixbeep.htm

Even my ASUS mobo's have 3 or 4 series of beeps as warnings. The shortest being 3.

The only way to investigate further would be to get the motherboards part number, the Phoenix bios version number and try to match it up in a google search. Every RAM stick I have has a part number. That might help if the motherboard manufacturer has a list of approved memory.

On the right hand side of the link I gave you, there are links to bios beep codes from other brands of bios'. From what I can see, whenever a long beep is involved, it tends to point to a RAM problem, either regular RAM or GPU RAM. Without exact part and version numbers, it'll be hard trying to narrow it down.

petersonlevi88

Ok, it has a phoenix award motherboard and is the hp pavilion a6030 series. I found beep codes that are very close to what I'm getting. It says 1 long and 2 short is a video failure problem. I'm just missing the second short beep, I think??? I'm gonna install a video card to see if this resolves the problem. If anybody has any further advice though, I am always happy to hear and learn. I will post again to let ya'all know if I had any success.

petersonlevi88

Ok, graphics card and original ram not working. with ram is 1 looooong beep. without ram is 1 long 1 short. codes don't match anything I'm getting

petersonlevi88

Thanks GoinEasy9

Goineasy9

I saw you asked for Matt's advice on another thread. I guess you still haven't figured it out. Well, I've really don't have anything else to point you to. It's more of a hardware problem than a Linux problem. My advice from this point would be the same as Matt's ... to try to remove and then install ram, video cards or other removable pieces of hardware until you can find the one that is causing the problem. When one of my 4 new sticks of RAM caused the POST to fail, I inserted one at a time into the primary RAM slot and booted one at a time until the offending stick was discovered. In my case, there were no beeps, just the absense of a motherboard POST.

Other things to look at: Make sure there is nothing on the motherboard that could be shorting something. Might take a flashlight and a magnifying glass, but, make sure there's nothing resting on the motherboard that could have been left behind when removing and instralling the RAM. A screw that was dropped that wound up in a hidden place etc.

Reseat graphics card, remove and reseat all connections, look at connections around RAM slots ... could you have pressed too hard or not completely seated the RAM.

Things like this drive me crazy when they happen to me, but, after cursing and throwing a few things, I'll start from scratch (like I was building the computer from scratch) and analytically go over every step rebuilding it until I work it out. Without the hardware in front of me, it's hard to spot what's going wrong.

petersonlevi88

Thanx.