Single ping repeating every 3 seconds; black screen; startup

I have a 2 year old Dell Inspiron 15R running Windows 10 and it's making a similar sound as described here by others. It appears that it primarily does this if it is restarted after just being shut down. Pulling the battery then replacing it usually works to clear the "error", but not always.

Could this be related to the temperature? Is my hard drive about to fail and all my data evapourate? Is my MB hooched? Any information from the lovely folks at Dell would be greatly appreciated; even if there was an error table showing the meaning of the sonar ping sequence.

#sonarping #blackscreen #startup