Note made to indicate that this problem appears to have been fixed with a new BIOS update. Details on the 2nd page, and wholehearted thanks to all who helped/tried to help/said prayers/exclaimed, "poor sap, I'm glad it's not me!"
- BIF
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It never fails. A holiday is coming, you have to catch a flight, and then some glossy, glittery tech in your life just stops working. Grrr!
The system affected is my main graphics, music, and F@H machine. Although right now it's completely down, in all honesty I won't be severely impacted even if it takes me a week or two to get it fixed, so at least there's that.
My system specs are in my signature below. Here's the timeline leading up to the warp reactor failure...
It started one day about 3-4 weeks ago when booting, I got 6 beeps (I think, but not certain) at boot time. The "main boot monitor" was working and it issued some sort of messages complaining about some problem with the NIC. My motherboard has two NICs and I was in a hurry that day, so I swapped the ethernet cable to the second NIC, did some other stuff, and rebooted this time with success. Well enough anyway. I never swapped to the original NIC to see if the problem came back, and even now I'm not sure that was the root cause.
Now we come to the weekend before Thanksgiving here in the US. It was a few hours before I was due to catch a flight. When preparing to travel, I usually like to install any pending updates and reboot my workstation as well as my home network to make sure that everything, including F@H, is running nice and clean before I leave town. When applying updates, I usually do a "restart" because in Windows 8.1 that really is a "cold start" for Windows. A restart is also a "warm start" for system and peripheral hardware devices, because electrical power is not removed while the machine boots. But that's (usually) minor; it's Windows that I'm really trying to give a fresh start.
Well, this time I did a "shut down" and "start". And that's when my day took a bad turn. The machine issues 6 beeps through the little speaker inside. A few seconds later, it issues the 6 beeps again. Then it takes about 1-2 minutes and repeats. There is no activity on any of the monitors this time.
I've done a few Google searches, and here's a starting list of things to check/try:
Basic Connection Checking:
1. Shut off power supply, wait, and retry. I did this with no success.
2. Double-check connections for keyboard and mouse. Try them in different USB ports. Both are USB and I tried this with no success. The keyboard is known to function correctly; I used it all day today with a different computer in my day job.
3. Replace motherboard battery (TBD)
4. Reseat GPU cards (TBD)
Isolation:
5. Try removing one GPU card, if no success, try changing power cables, then try removing the other GPU. (TBD)
6. Reseat and/or diagnose memory cards (TBD)
7. Try a new power supply (TBD)
In addition to the hardware in my signature, I also have a Focusrite Sapphire Liquid 56 audio/midi interface (Firewire) and a UAD-2 Duo DSP (PCIe with no external connections). The Focusrite has been powered down and unplugged and its absence still won't allow the system to boot. The UAD2 is still plugged into its PCIe slot, but it's been around for a few years now and there's no indication that it is causing the malfunction. Eventually, I'll remove it as part of my isolation efforts.
Can anybody think of anything else I should consider, especially with 6 beeps and nothing appearing on the displays?