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Dell Vostro does not turn on, constantly beeping
I have Dell Vostro 3360 for more than 2 years now (1 year running windows 10 installed from scratch) and yesterday it stopped working.
At first it does not want to start, when I press 'power' button it starts beeping (very similar sound to the sound when battery is low, though I am not 100% positive). It beeps with regular intervals and does not boot. A couple of times it booted but after several minutes I received blue screens, but both times with different messages:
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
IRQL.. something
When I tried to restart it after one of the successful boots it just turned off.
The day before yesterday update was applied to operating system (win 10), but I am not really sure whether it is the problem. I replaced hdd with no luck, still beeps and refuses to boot.
Is it possible that windows update could install malicious driver which broke the hardware?
How can I troubleshoot this issue and find the real cause behind the problem?
Thanks in advance!
ejn63
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July 23rd, 2016 14:00
Try the memory modules one at a time - and in each socket -- until you isolate the bad module (replace that) or the bad socket (which will require a replacement mainboard).
ejn63
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July 22nd, 2016 10:00
The pattern of beeps will indicate which component has failed - is it a single repeating beep, or something like three, pause, three -- if the latter, how many beeps between pauses?
No, it's not a driver that would cause this -- some component in the system has failed. One clearly was the hard drive, but if you've replaced that to no effect, something else is faulty as well. The beep code pattern will tell you.
yshang
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July 22nd, 2016 13:00
That was very helpful, thanks. I turned the laptop on and it booted successfully, I visited dell diagnostics site and run troubleshooting utility. It crashed while scanning CPU, video, hdd and memory components with bluescreen 'driver overran stack buffer'. Reboot proceeded successfully and after 1 minute system crashed with 'system thread not handled exception'.
Next time the laptop refused to boot and emitted 4 beep signals (repeated continuously with several seconds pause in between). From what I have found (http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN293445)
yshang
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July 25th, 2016 04:00
Thanks, for unknown reason half of my previous comment didn't show up. It looks that one unused memory socket was bad from the start - memory couldn't be fixed there. I have reinserted RAM module into the first socket and now no beeps can be heard, but the screen remains black after I turn the laptop on. Will look for a good memory module to try since obviously something was wrong with RAM. Though my gut feeling tells me that I will most likely have to replace the system board.