PhoenixBIOS: Phoenix BIOS issues a special beep code when a fatal error has occurred. A fatal error implies that an important part of the system has failed and, in general, POST (Power On Self Test) has aborted and the system cannot boot. PhoenixBIOS beep codes are encoded versions of the POST codes described in the user manual. The Phoenix BIOS Post Code and Beep generic user manual lists the beep codes for versions 4.00 to 4.06 of Phoenix BIOS.
| DEC-HEX-BIN Conversion Code Chart | ||||||||||||||||
| DECIMAL | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||||||||||
| HEX | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F |
| BINARY | 0000 | 0001 | 0010 | 0011 | 0100 | 0101 | 0110 | 0111 | 1000 | 1001 | 1010 | 1011 | 1100 | 1101 | 1110 | 1111 |
AwardBIOS: The only Award BIOS beep code indicates that a video error has occurred and the BIOS cannot initialize the video screen to display any additional information. This beep code consists of a single long beep followed by two short beeps. Any other beeps are probably an error with RAM (Random Access Memory) or CPU (Central Processing Unit). The beep code for the former (RAM) is repeating beeps, and for the latter (CPU) is either hi/low beeps or hi frequency beeps.
The following chart will be useful if you have to figure out the beep code from the error code in Phoenix BIOS:
It's not always so easy to pop out the CMOS battery (watch battery on the motherboard, or half AA for even older models), so try these (if you need to change BIOS settings and are locked out)…