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Blinking amber light and 6 beeps.
I have a dell inspiron 580 more than a year old. I turned it off last night and then booted it up this morning to find that it had the blinking amber light and was beeping 6 times. The beeping was evenly spaced, not like what is described on the dell error code page here:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim3000/en/sm/adtshoot.htm#wp1056471
I tried reseating the ram and unpluging all of the power cable to the motherboard, hdd, CD, etc. That didn't do anything. Frustrated, I decided to go to breakfast. I came back and it booted up in what looked to be a safe mode version of windows 7 though it did not say it was and it did not come up with the F8 boot menu.
Everything is factory standard except my graphics card and my power supply which i replaced about a month or 2 ago.
The graphics card is an EVGA GTS 450 and the power supply is an Ultra LS600 Lifetime Series 600W Power Supply.
Up till now I have not had any hardware problems.
Any Ideas?
RoHe
10 Elder
10 Elder
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43.6K Posts
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September 4th, 2011 11:00
You said you have an Inspiron 580, so why is your link to the manual for a Dimension 3000??
According the 580 manual, 6 beeps is a video card issue, and blinking amber power button may be a motherboard failure.
Power off, unplug and press/hold power button for ~15 sec
Open the case and remove the motherboard battery
Press/hold power button again for ~30 sec
Now reseat the video card in its slot
Reinstall the battery (right-side-up) and see if it boots properly now.
If not, you may need a new video card, or possibly a motherboard... :emotion-9:
Ron
juliuscaesar270
4 Posts
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September 4th, 2011 14:00
thank you so much. your suggestion got the thing to boot up. ya, im not sure how i got to the Dimension 3000 error manual, but thanks for posting the actual manual for inspiron 580s for future reference. once i got it to boot it said something about repairing windows so i let it do that, then system restored it to a few days ago rebooted, and I am happily posting from it now. Other than some issue with firefox (which is usually easy to fix), its back to normal. Thanks for all your help!
RoHe
10 Elder
10 Elder
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43.6K Posts
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September 4th, 2011 16:00
:emotion-21:
Have you scanned thoroughly for malware recently?
Ron
juliuscaesar270
4 Posts
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September 4th, 2011 17:00
I'm doing a scan right now. nothing major seems to have popped up. I did a scan a few weeks ago. I think what caused this whole mess was updating my EVGA overclock utility. It asked me to reboot when I finished installing it. I just shut it off instead of restarting cause it was late last night. I turned it on this morning and it amber lighted and beeped. But everything is fine now. Thanks so much for your help.
benmoorethantha
2 Posts
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January 27th, 2012 18:00
juliuscaesar270
4 Posts
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January 27th, 2012 21:00
4 beeps Means that there is a ram read write error. I'd try reseating the ram. If that doesn't work you may need new ram. The blinking amber power light may be a problem with the system board. Why exactly were you opening the cover while it still had power?
benmoorethantha
2 Posts
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January 27th, 2012 22:00
How do u reset the ram? I'm new to all this if u can't tell! I had downloaded the drivers for a video card and was going to put the card in when it happened. I thought I had shut the computer off but as soon as I took off that panel it turned back on and started beeping. I then realized I had just put it to sleep!