No POST, but beeps (need insight)

[Xorcist]

I have a friend with a machine which does not post, but beeps with a high tone, followed by a low tone. Anyone have any ideas. I'm pretty sure it's not the memory as I had him take the memory out and got successive high tone beeps. Could maybe his video card or processor be fried? Is there any easy way to tell?

Note: I can't go over and look at the machine as he is quite a few states away, and all of my assistance is being done via phone.

[MRCOMPUTER]

Could be the hardware monitor senses a bad processor fan.
Have him turn it on with the case open and eyeball it...

[bailey]

that sounds like the high tempture alarm.
also you might want to go into the bios and double check the settings, if you can get that far

[Xorcist]

Well there is no fan on the processor, only a heatsink. And apparently he can't even get into the BIOS, system never gets that far. As soon as he powers up the system beeps and that's it. Screen never gets a signal and the system most likely does not POST (can't see the screen obviously).

[bailey]

no fan on the cpu ?

post the system spects and what hardware is installed

[Bill in SD, CA]

This happened to me when I overclocked too much.

Had to reset the BIOS by holding down one of the keys (don't remember which one) when I switched on the power.

Bill

[Xorcist]

Well I was able to lookup the beep codes for the Award BIOS, but that didn't help much as Award apparently let's each and ever manufacturer customize them.

I told my buddy to reseat the video card and try again, before we move onto anything else.

It was tough for me to get alot of his system specs because he's not all that knowledgable about these types of things, but I was able to get the following info:

Creative BlasterPC M003 Motherboard
Pentium III 900Mhz (Slot 1) Heatsink/No Fan
256MB 133 SDRAM (he thinks)
NVidia GeForce2 MX400 Heatsink/No Fan
* System is not overclocked

Seems he recently bought a new microsoft optical wheel mouse, and after installing the software got some wierd message about missing files the next time he rebooted Windows. After which the machine started up with the beep codes.

I doubt that has anything to do with it, but I'm wondering if maybe he bent the PS2 port on the motherboard and thus shorted something out. (The mouse was USB, but he was using the USB to PS2 adapter)

[stroyal]

Hard to beleave that a PIII 900 can run without a fan. It would have to have a huge heatsink.

[Xorcist]

Well he's been running the same setup for over 3 years... I'd assume the processor would have burnt out long before now if it was going to at all. I really wish I could get a look at the system myself, but it's just not an option right now.

[MRCOMPUTER]

Probably like a dell, when the processor heatsink is cooled by a power supply or case fan and a plastic shield.

Have him reseat the processor and memory, along with the video card...