Lenovo ThinkCentre M56 4 bios beeps

[Bitter]

Alright, I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre M57 (6072-BVU) that just spins up fans on high for a few seconds then 4 short beeps and becomes completely unresponsive until the power is pulled and reconnected. I can't seem to find 4 beeps in Lenovo literature, I wanted to make sure it's a dead board before giving up.

 

I'm doing someone a favor, and of the 3 ThinkCentre computers they've acquired and were using this one is the 'best' in the sense that it can take 45nm Core2 stuff and so I can swap out the E5200 for say an E8400 or something a little faster,  it's got SATA2, and in general sounds like it's a better computer to try to fix. Also they wanted me to 'just put the hard drive from that one in the other one, they're all the same' well they're not all the same, the other 2 are 965/963 chipsets with a P4 3.4Ghz and a Pentium D 2.8Ghz, I doubt Windows7 will appreciate just being dumped into foreign hardware without something breaking to the point where fixing it means wiping and reinstalling which defeats the purpose of 'just put the hard drive in the other one'.

[Bitter]

Solved, bad stick of RAM. I swapped the CPU to a known good board, and it posted, so I started swapping RAM to the test board and found one to be bad, so that's good! I also discovered the TIM between the heatsink and CPU had failed entirely, it had melted, pushed to the sides and turned rock hard leaving bare core to copper plate contacting in a couple spots maybe. I also replaced the TIM on the northbridge as it had gone hard and chunky too.