Beeps & will not boot or bring up BIOS

Our Pentium 2, 266 mhz, Windows ME, was running earlier today and shut down normally. But later it would only beep (3 second duration) followed by silence (2 second duration) and the process would repeat (I allowed 6 to 7 cycles of this). But it would never show a boot up screen. I had to hold the power button in to get it to shut down (merely pressing the off button would not turn it off).

The monitor was working and showing the "check cables" message, but there was never anything that would indicate that any feed was coming from the MB at all.

The last operation before the normal shutdown was to check for and manage email messages. There were 3 messages which Norton alerted on and quarantined. There were a number of messages that were subsequently deleted.

Does anyone have any words of advice that might help me get this system to work again?

Thanks, Ed B

 

Additional information.

I just now remembered that I tried to boot from a floppy and got the same result as above. (I am currently reading everything I can find by searching the forum for 'boot' problems.)

Also makes no difference to hold down F8, Ctrl, Esc, or Del keys while powering on.

Ed B

 

Beep Codes

 

I am no longer amazed by what I forget.

Thanks markp62, I'll investigate that. The old puter upstairs isn't working well either! I really did know about those at one time, but I had forgotten all about them!

 

Please let us know how it goes.

 

The Solution.

OK Mark, I have found the problem and the system is up and running.

The apparent problem was a loose connection in the ribbon cable connecting the floppy drive to the MB. It wasn't fully seated in the MB receptical.

FWIW, the BIOS is Award v4.51PG and when the ribbon cable is detached, it will emit the beep pattern described in my first post. (BTW I never did find that beep pattern described anywhere on the Internet.)

Aside from having to do a system restore, un-installing and reinstalling Norton Internet Security and Anti Virus everything worked out OK.

Thanks, Ed B

 

I thank you for posting the information on that particular beep code and the problem being a loose floppy drive cable, and glad to hear you have sorted it out.