GA-EP45-DS3R

[brucec4689]

This system has been up and running fine for over a year. However, I just noticed that when I boot from the hard drive, Windows boots normally & everything works. When I boot from CD or try to go into safe mode (safe mode or safe mode CLI), the system starts to boot but then gives a continuous beep which is resolved only by powering down. This is strange since I originally installed the system (Vista) by booting from the CD. There are no errors displayed during POST.

Any suggestions? Any diagnostics I can run to isolate the problem?

The following is what I have already tried:
- reseating the video card
- reseating memory
- removing the CD/DVD drive
- loading CMOS "optimized defaults"

My hardware configuration:

Motherboard: GA-EP45-DS3R
M/B Rev : 1.0
BIOS Ver : F8

Video Card: ATiRADEON HD 3650
CPU Brand : Intel E8400 DualCore
OS : Vista 32-bit
Memory Size : Corsair 4GB
Power Supply : 500 W

I have not tried swapping out the video card yet since I didn't have a spare PCI express card but that is the next step I suppose.

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[enzo matrix]

What makes you think it's a hardware problem?

 

[brucec4689]

What makes you think it's a hardware problem?

Attempting to boot with two different boot CD's plus booting from safe mode was an attempt to eliminate software as an issue. Booting from CD should not be relying on any O/S software on the hard drive.
It still could be software/firmware I suppose. The continuous beep is actually coming from the LCD monitor, when I swapped out the LCD monitor with an older CRT-type, I was able to boot to safe mode or from a CD fine and do what I needed to do. The problem still remains, however. Booting from the Vista O/S on the hard drive works fine, but booting from Safe Mode or from CD results in a continuous beep resolved only by powering down (or disconnecting the monitor).

So my new question is: what is different about booting in Safe Mode or booting from CD? Is there a difference in display settings, resolution, frequency, etc. when booting in this manner? Or am I just seeing flaky behavior from a soon-to-fail component?