World Magazine 2024
AMI BIOS Beep Codes
The AMI BIOS is the most popular BIOS and is used by most of the top motherboard manufacturers. You should be able to determine your system BIOS by reading the screen display on the Top screen during startup up. If not, such as on some Compaq, Dell and Gateway computers, you will need to refer to the owners manual to determine the BIOS type.
Startup Procedure and Error Detection
The normal procedure is to power up the PC system, watch for error message on the monitor screen and listen to the PC beep tone. A single beep during boot-up process is normal and does not indicate a failure if the system continues to boot-up.
- 1 Beep tone – DRAM refresh failure
- 2 Beep tones – DRAM Parity failure
- 3 Beep tones – Base 64K RAM failure
- 4 Beep tones – System timer error
- 5 Beep tones – CPU failure
- 6 Beep tones – Keyboard controller error
- 7 Beep tones – Virtual mode error
- 8 Beep tones – Display memory read/write error
- 9 Beep tones – ROM BIOS checksum error
- 10 Beep tones – CMOS register read/write error
- 11 Beep tones – Cache memory error
- Continuous Beep tone – Memory Failure, Video Memory or Video Card Failure
