Problems With A Gate Machine

[doubledragon5]

My inlaw has a Gateway 700XL Desktop here is the new issues... This morning when he went to power the machine he got three beeps...They were all two seconds or so apart.. Nothing on the monitor or anything.. He rebooted his machine three additional times and got the same thing... After booting it a fourth time it finally loaded no problem... What could this be...

Systems specs.. Lexington MB for Intel with 3.06GHZ P4 with HT.
2GB 4x512MB Samsung RDRAM.
Stock heatsink fan
ATI 9700 Pro VC.
2x200GB 7200RPM Maxtor HD
Soundblaster Audigy sound card.

[Panama Red]

I think 3 beeps is memory error. Have him/her run Memtest86+ and see if that's the problem. I double checked and found this:

http://support.gateway.com/s/Servers/COMPO/MOTHERBD/WME872304/WME873098faq26.shtml

[doubledragon5]

Ok I downloaded the memtest. When I doubleded click on the install file a dos window opened up and asked to insert a disk which I did, but during install it failed.. What could be the issue with the install

[Panama Red]

Was it a formatted floppy? I always use the floppy program.

[doubledragon5]

The floopy was formated....

[Panama Red]

Just try it again I guess. Or use the .iso file and make a bootable disk.

[glc]

If you are using a 2K or XP machine to make the disk, you will get that error - just keep going and it will write the floppy.

[doubledragon5]

OK I reformatted through the cmd prompt and it worked.. Now we ran memtest 86 and everything came OK.. So we figured it was a fluck or something wrong.. Then next morning my in law was not able to boot his machine again. It did the same thing, but no matter how many times you booted, he wasn't able to get to the desktop.. After swapping out memory in pairs we found the bad stick.. Out of three one was bad for sure... Gateway is now going to send him a replacement stick of 512MB RDRAM...

[Panama Red]

Nice work DD!

[doubledragon5]

Thanks Red. I owe my knowledge to PCMECH and trial and error....:)