Boot up 1 beep on HP Elite SFF 8200

[VioletHerson]

Hello,

I am trying to diagnose my PC boot up issue.    I get a single beep when I boot up,  with a blank screen.  To resolve, I press the power button once (short press), and restart - it then boots up ok.  This happens frequently.

BIOS is American Megatrends.

Recently installed fresh RAM - all the same Elpida 2gb  total 8gb.

Did windows memory check and it worked - no errors reported.

Reseated memory but still get issue.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

V

[VioletHerson]

Could it be the cmos battery?   The time does not reset on windows.

[mdklassen]

>  I get a single beep when I boot up.

That is to be expected -- the POST (Power On Self Test) is signalling that it has successfully completed.

> with a blank screen.

That is not good.  Possibly, the disk-drive is taking "longer-than-normal" to go from "off" to "ready to boot".

By the time that you restart it, the disk-drive is "fully awake", and responds in the "normal" amount of time.

How old is the disk-drive?

Have you recently launched the HP Hardware Diagnostics, and chosen the "short" (a few minutes) test of the health of the disk-drive?

[VioletHerson]

I have replaced the hard drive that was originally in the machine with two storage devices.  A secondary Western Digital 2TB SATA and a primary Crucial MX300 275 SSD.  The SSD was new and I don't expect issues with the other one.

Both drives are being reported as 'Healthy' under Disk Management which I launched from the HP Support software.

Thing is, during normal boot up, it does not emit the short beep.  Only when it hangs during boot up.  After which, a short power press switches it off, and a normal boot occurs on the second attempt.

I'm at a loss on how to diagnose this one.

[mdklassen]

> I have replaced the hard drive that was originally in the machine with two storage devices. 

> A secondary Western Digital 2TB SATA and a primary Crucial MX300 275 SSD. 

> The SSD was new and I don't expect issues with the other one.

But, since you are having issues, please try:

1. immediately after power-on, press ESC, to see a menu. 

From the menu, press the indicated key to launch the HP Hardware Diagnostics, and target the tests against the WD disk-drive.

or ...

2. Disconnect the AC power, disconnect the data/power from the WD disk-drive, reconnect the AC power, and reboot.

Do you still experience the symptoms?

3. Google-search for "download free SPECCY".

Download, install, and run it, expand the "Storage" section, select one disk-drive, and expand the S.M.A.R.T. section, and review the individual statistics.

Repeat for the other disk-drive.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

> Both drives are being reported as 'Healthy' under Disk Management

That reports on the "logical" correctness of the file-system, not on the "physical" status of a disk-drive (SMART reports on the physical status).

[VioletHerson]

After ESC, the HP diagnostics esitmated nearly 5 hours to diagnose - I had to cancel it mid way as I had to get some work done.

SPECCY reports all the SMART attributes as 'Good'.

Do I still need to contirue with the HP Hardware Diagnostics? if so, I will kick it off again later.

Thanks.

[mdklassen]

> SPECCY reports all the SMART attributes as 'Good'.

SPECCY does not have a 'Perfect' option -- in some of the measurements, a few "faults" in some category are not enough to report 'warn' or 'fail'.  So, it's important to look at the individual values.  Particularly, check the "spin-up" time.

> Do I still need to contirue with the HP Hardware Diagnostics?

The "optional" tests of RAM can take several hours.

When I use MEMTEST86+ -- from www.memtest.org -- it takes about 20 minutes per GB of RAM.

If it has not found any problems by 20 minutes, I doubt that it ever will.

The "long" disk-drive test can take a long time. Lots of I/O -- to test every block on the disk-drive.

[VioletHerson]

I did do the memcheck in windows, and after it finished, no errors were reported on the RAM.

I will do the hard drive check asap, but surely a bad sector should not cause issues during Post.  The beep occurs before the OS is loaded.

[mdklassen]

---

@VioletHerson@  wrote:

I did do the memcheck in windows, and after it finished, no errors were reported on the RAM.

I will do the hard drive check asap, but surely a bad sector should not cause issues during Post. 

The beep occurs before the OS is loaded.

---

So, the RAM is OK.

One beep before Windows starts to load is to be expected -- the POST (Power On Self Test) is signalling that it has successfully completed, and that the motherboard is about to try to load Windows from the disk-drive.

[VioletHerson]

...except, after the beep, it just hangs.  Then on the second try, it normally loads up ok without a beep.