Beep sound

[The Belgian Waffle]

Hello,

 

I'm having a slightly difficult problem to solve.

 

I was using my laptop (playing LoL). The thing shut itself down and never powered up again.

Since then, I'm trying litteraly every single thing to see if the problem is coming from a particular piece.

 

No matter what I do (or which F key I press), the laptop boots, either into BIOS or any other possible option.

After about a minute, the fan starts spinning at full freaking load and then the motherboard beeps 22 times and after that it shuts itself down.

 

So far, I've tried :

- Removing the hard drive

- Removing and switching ram sticks

- Booting with no ram

- Removing fan

- Boot from USB and access recovery

- Install windows into a USB stick and boot from there

- Boot from the hard drive using USB and a sata to USB box

- Removing the CMOS battery

- Using only the battery without power cable

- Using the computer without thr battery, only with the power cable

 

The CPU is recognized correctly by the laptop in the BIOS menu. Same for the HDD and both ram sticks.

 

I have legitimately no idea what's going on. If someone could help me I would highly appreciate it.

[dcb-z]

Is there any pattern to the beeping? Sounds to me like it's giving you a POST code. What laptop do you have?

[The Belgian Waffle]

5 minutes ago, dcb-z said:

Is there any pattern to the beeping? Sounds to me like it's giving you a POST code. What laptop do you have?

It goes like this

SoundRecord-2017-06-26-01-00-40.wav

 

There are about 22 beeps

[dcb-z]

5 minutes ago, The Belgian Waffle said:

It goes like this

SoundRecord-2017-06-26-01-00-40.wav

 

There are about 22 beeps

Can't seem to get the file to play. Can you put it up on Youtube or something?

 

What laptop do you have?

[The Belgian Waffle]

3 minutes ago, dcb-z said:

Can't seem to get the file to play. Can you put it up on Youtube or something?

 

What laptop do you have?

I have converted it in mp3. Hope it works.

I have a Gigabyte Q2556N. I know, it's a quite rare laptop

SoundRecord-2017-06-26-01-00-40.mp3

[dcb-z]

I'm not sure what BIOS you have, but I found this on Gigabyte's website:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Support/FAQ/816

 

Are you sure there's no pattern to the beeping? No group of consistently timed beeps followed by a pause? There's no issue on the FAQ listed for 22 beeps, but I'm going to assume that the code repeats itself at least once.

[The Belgian Waffle]

4 minutes ago, dcb-z said:

I'm not sure what BIOS you have, but I found this on Gigabyte's website:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Support/FAQ/816

 

Are you sure there's no pattern to the beeping? No group of consistently timed beeps followed by a pause? There's no issue on the FAQ listed for 22 beeps, but I'm going to assume that the code repeats itself at least once.

It's an American Megatrends Motherboard, I have found the same listing on their website. It could be any of those problems.

Could it be that the motherboard itself is broken in any significant way that could cause that?

 

Edit : Also, the beep is constant. Did you manage to access the audio file? 

[dcb-z]

5 minutes ago, The Belgian Waffle said:

It's an American Megatrends Motherboard, I have found the same listing on their website. It could be any of those problems.

Could it be that the motherboard itself is broken in any significant way that could cause that?

Well, it could feasibly be about 3 of those errors on the FAQ page. Assuming the it's 1 beep repeating 22 times, it's a memory error; assuming it's 2 beeps repeated 11 times, it's a memory parity check error; assuming it's 11 beeps repeated twice, it's a CPU cache memory function. So either your RAM is going bad or your CPU is possibly failing.

 

Is there some way for you to run something like MemTest to possibly rule out something going wrong with your RAM?

[The Belgian Waffle]

3 minutes ago, dcb-z said:

Well, it could feasibly be about 3 of those errors on the FAQ page. Assuming the it's 1 beep repeating 22 times, it's a memory error; assuming it's 2 beeps repeated 11 times, it's a memory parity check error; assuming it's 11 beeps repeated twice, it's a CPU cache memory function. So either your RAM is going bad or your CPU is possibly failing.

 

Is there some way for you to run something like MemTest to possibly rule out something going wrong with your RAM?

I'll try this tomorrow. Thank you for your help; I'll keep you updated.

[The Belgian Waffle]

10 hours ago, dcb-z said:

Snip

It doesn't boot from the USB stick. No idea why.

[dcb-z]

6 hours ago, The Belgian Waffle said:

It doesn't boot from the USB stick. No idea why.

Did you go into BIOS and change the boot order so that it'll try booting to the USB stick? Or is it already configured that way?

[The Belgian Waffle]

1 hour ago, dcb-z said:

Did you go into BIOS and change the boot order so that it'll try booting to the USB stick? Or is it already configured that way?

Already that way

[dcb-z]

16 minutes ago, The Belgian Waffle said:

Already that way

Did a search and found some people saying that you have to make the USB stick bootable first. Not too sure because I've personally never done it, but I found this guide on how to format the flash drive: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200124.aspx

Maybe try putting MemTest on your flash drive after you format it for booting?

[The Belgian Waffle]

26 minutes ago, dcb-z said:

Did a search and found some people saying that you have to make the USB stick bootable first. Not too sure because I've personally never done it, but I found this guide on how to format the flash drive: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200124.aspx

Maybe try putting MemTest on your flash drive after you format it for booting?

It keeps beeping and restarting, even when it boots through the usb stick

Edit : I'm almost sure this is not the ram

[dcb-z]

37 minutes ago, The Belgian Waffle said:

It keeps beeping and restarting, even when it boots through the usb stick

Edit : I'm almost sure this is not the ram

Might be that it's the CPU issue, then. I'm not too sure what else could be causing the issue, and it does kind of make sense for it to be 11 beeps repeated twice.

[The Belgian Waffle]

28 minutes ago, dcb-z said:

Might be that it's the CPU issue, then. I'm not too sure what else could be causing the issue, and it does kind of make sense for it to be 11 beeps repeated twice.

I brought it to a pretty big store, here, in Belgium, and he tried out a couple of things. He told me it isn't a harddrive issue and that it could be the cmos battery.

He said he had an old machine with a similar problem : He took out the cmos when he wasn't supposed to and the machine refusted to boot. He had to flash the bios.

 

The thing is, I do not have enough time to flash the bios, since the machine restarts after two minutes, and if it restarts during the installation, the laptop is pretty much dead.

 

I'll bring it to another store tomorrow that is kinda teckier than the one I went to today, and I'll see what they say.

 

I've also noticed that if I try to boot normally, the PC shows just a black screen, but if I boot with my harddrive connected to an usb port, it will show me the windows logo (before beeping and crashing).

I don't know if this is related to this but yeah, weird.

Also, I took the heat pipe off and took a couple of pictures. The CPU doesn't look particularly broken to me, but I should see the other side to tell if it looks broken or not.

 

Edit : The thermal paste has been applied by a fucking monkey, if you want my opinion, but I highly doubt that it would not allow my laptop to boot.

 

[dcb-z]

Yikes, that thermal paste application looks pretty terrible. If you really want, you could clean the paste off with some high concentration rubbing alcohol and give it a fresh, proper application. Some thermal pastes do contain metal IIRC and can potentially cause shorts if they come into contact with board components.

 

You also won't really be able to tell if the CPU is broken just by the exterior, as it may be a failure with the silicon inside naturally deteriorating with use: some people are luckier than others when it comes to components. If at all possible, perhaps you could try to find a replacement CPU for your laptop? I don't know how feasible (or affordable) that might be if it's a mobile processor, though, but it might be worth a shot, assuming you can even remove your laptop's CPU.

[The Belgian Waffle]

4 minutes ago, dcb-z said:

Snip

I'll see tomorrow if they sell thermal compound. If not, I'll buy some on Amazon.

Concerning the CPU, it looks like I can remove it since there's a screw holding the thing to the motherboard, but I'll have to check which CPUs could fit with this motherboard + the price of a matching CPU, which is probably ridiculously high, considering no one buys laptop CPUs.

 

I should probably contact Gigabyte, but I've had other issues with this laptop and their customer service is just awful.

 

[The Belgian Waffle]

I brought it to the store today, it looks like a little LTT shop.

The guy told me one heat sensor is probably dead, this is why the fan doesn't spin when I turn the PC on, and 30 secs after, it spins full load.

The HDD is *okay*, so I might wanna copy my files somewhere else.

 

He applied some new thermal paste and it didn't change much. He noticed the heat pipe was already quite hold right after powering on the device.

 

His guess was a heat sensor completely freaked out, which makes the machine unusable.

[The Belgian Waffle]

It doesn't beep if there's no ram installed, the power button and other leds just blink.

[dcb-z]

9 hours ago, The Belgian Waffle said:

I brought it to the store today, it looks like a little LTT shop.

The guy told me one heat sensor is probably dead, this is why the fan doesn't spin when I turn the PC on, and 30 secs after, it spins full load.

The HDD is *okay*, so I might wanna copy my files somewhere else.

 

He applied some new thermal paste and it didn't change much. He noticed the heat pipe was already quite hold right after powering on the device.

 

His guess was a heat sensor completely freaked out, which makes the machine unusable.

The heat sensor sounds plausible, especially if it takes a minute or two for the machine to cut off. I'm not really sure how you would get that fixed, though.

[The Belgian Waffle]

1 hour ago, dcb-z said:

The heat sensor sounds plausible, especially if it takes a minute or two for the machine to cut off. I'm not really sure how you would get that fixed, though.

I contacted the Gigabyte support. We'll see in a couple of days what they say.

[MRX0000001]

Hi I am having exactly the same problem. Exactly down to the most minute detail. Any chance you found a solution. 

Thanks in advance from Australia