How to Troubleshoot Beep Codes
If you’re hearing beep codes after you turn your computer on—and then it doesn’t start—it means the motherboard encountered some kind of problem before it was able to send any error information to the monitor. Follow these steps below to determine what problem the beep code is representing. Once you know what’s wrong, you can work to fix the issue.
More Help With Beep Codes
Some computers, even though they may have BIOS firmware made by a particular company, like AMI or Award, further customize their beep-to-problem language, making this process a little frustrating. If you think this might be the case, or just worried it could be, almost every computer maker publishes their beep code list in their user guides, which you can probably find online. Restart your computer if you need to hear the beeping again. You’re probably not going to make whatever problem you have worse by restarting a few times. Yes, this might all seem a little crazy, but this is important information that will help determine what issue the beep codes are representing. If you get this wrong, you’ll be trying to solve a problem your computer doesn’t have and ignoring the real one. The easiest way to do this is to install a free system information tool, which should tell you if your BIOS is made by AMI, Award, Phoenix, or another company. If that doesn’t work, you could open your computer and take a peek at the actual BIOS chip on the motherboard, which should have the company name printed on or next to it.
AMI Beep Code Troubleshooting (AMIBIOS) Award Beep Code Troubleshooting (AwardBIOS) Phoenix Beep Code Troubleshooting (PhoenixBIOS)
Using the beep code information specific to those BIOS makers, you’ll be able to figure out exactly what’s wrong that’s causing the beeping, be it a RAM issue, a video card problem, or some other hardware problem. If you need help digging up your computer’s manual, go online to find tech support information.
