Dell Studio 540 tower beeps 3 times at bootup

[tmathews]

I'm fixing a friend's Dell Studio 540 (service tag 3YPYXH1) that wouldn't boot. After replacing the BIOS battery, the machine boots again but gives a series of three short beeps during the initial boot. Everything seems to work okay and there are no error messages but I assume it's trying to tell me something. The owner reports it's done this intermittently for a while.

I've searched the web for the beep codes for this machine and haven't been able to find anything. I checked Dell's Service and Setup manuals but found no references to beep codes. For other Dell machines, three beeps seems to indicate a memory problem so I've kicked off a memtest86+ run. The owner added an extra 2x2GB of Kingston DDR2-800 RAM so I could believe the BIOS is unhappy. The BIOS recognizes all 6GB and the owner reports no stability problems.

Does anyone have any documentation telling what the three beeps means and whether he can safely ignore them?

[glc]

Unplug all USB devices except keyboard/mouse. Does it still do it?

[tmathews]

Yes. All I've got plugged in now is the keyboard, mouse, and monitor (motherboard VGA).

I ran over 8 passes of memtest86+ last night with no errors so memory seems to be functioning correctly. I don't see a diagnostic partition on the disk -- I'll have to check whether Dell has a machine-specific downloadable diagnostics suite I can run.

[glc]

Press F12 on startup to access diagnostics.

[tmathews]

glc: thanks for pointing that out. On my Inspiron 500m it says to press F11 for diagnostics in addition to F2 for setup and F12 for the boot menu. I was assuming it would be the same for this machine.

Anyway, I ran Dell's diagnostics and it came up clean. I ran short and long HDD tests and they passed as well. Those plus memtest passing give me high confidence that the machine is working properly.

I tried pulling the BIOS battery to see if it would boot without it or just hang again. It boots, and produces a series of beeps signaling low battery voltage (I think it was 8, but I was less interested in that than that it booted). The beeps themselves are longer than the three beeps, so maybe the three beeps aren't trying to signal an error.

I've also looked through a bunch of complaints about these machines failing to boot, mostly after the warranty has expired. The resolution usually seems to be either power supply or motherboard replacement. Few mention the BIOS battery. Replacing the motherboard probably brings a new or at least non-dead battery, which gets the machine booting again. I'm not sure how a low battery would cause a pre-boot hang, but the moral seems to be to check the battery.

Unless someone has other ideas about things to check, I'm just going to give it back and call it good. Thanks for the help with this.

[bob]

If possible remove the bios chip and reseat.
Dell BIOS Post Codes - BIOS Central

[tmathews]

Thanks for the suggestion but I've already given the machine back. If it comes back again with problems I'll give that a try.

Thinking about the original boot failure some more, it's possible there's a BIOS fix to work around the problem (though I didn't try this). Of course, for this machine at least, by the time the new battery starts to die it'll be too much of a dinosaur to bother with...