BleepingComputer.com: My Computer is... bleeping

My friend's hard drive died today and I offered to hook it up to my computer to try to salvage data from it. I attached the IDE and power cable of my Dell Dimension desktop and powered up, and it would not get past the BIOS screen, so I removed the new hard drive and tried to boot up. Unfortunately, the system's reaction was to produce several pairs of low-pitched bleeps and then fall silent without ever displaying to the monitor. I'm pretty sure I didn't jostle anything and I didn't reposition any motherboard connections. Has anyone heard this type of noise before?

Open the computer & recheck all connections.
Also check the memory to make sure it is seated properly.
If you have a video card check it too.
your problem with your friends hard drive is it needed to be set to Slave.
If you didn't change the jumper on the back of the hard drive you were trying to boot 2 Master drives which won't work.

This post has been edited by fairjoeblue: 28 May 2009 - 10:38 PM

fairjoeblue, on May 28 2009, 10:37 PM, said:

Thanks for reminding me about the jumper; I had totally forgotten. I reseated everything and the beeps still persist though. Does anyone know what low system beeps can be caused by?

Each bios has their own set of beep codes. count the number of beeps and whether they are long or short. here is a website that shows different beep codes. http://www.pchell.com/hardware/beepcodes.shtml

So you are saying you are getting this error when you took your friends hard drive out and tried to boot your computer up original configuration?

I was completely lost and ready to give up on this computer when I noticed a small piece of dirt that looked like the outer coat of a single corn kernel laying on the mobo. I picked it up but didn't think much of it. About 10 minutes later I fired up the computer and everything worked as normal. I have no idea what was going on there, but I'm glad everything is back in working order.