Random Beep from motherboard (PC boots)

[mosherben]

Hello,
I have a Gigabyte board running a E4300 CPU (Running at stock 1.8GHz speed) and it randomly has a long beep coming from the motherboard (I believe it's near the CPU). It seems to have started doing this after I disconnected a hard drive.

I'm not sure if this is related, but the said now-disconnected hard drive had failed about a week ago. I had the Western Digital drive since I built the system about 5 years ago now.

So, does anyone have any ideas what's up?

[Kaged]

Is it a long continuous beep or does it have a break between beeps?

Double check all power power cables are seated correctly, especially graphics card one if it has one?

Does it get into Windows?

[mosherben]

Hi Kaged,
yes, I tried to mention this in my original post. The PC does boot into Windows. Ie, it goes past post and functions fine. But, the beep occurs randomly.

The beep's can last for random periods of time, from a few seconds to a few minutes. After doing abit of research, I read that it could be the CPU overheating.

I checked the BIOS PC Health Monitor and it the CPU Temperature was 67 C. I also checked for warnings enabled and my BIOS gives a warning when the CPU is 60 C or more. So it could be this?

I'm thinking about buying a new stock cooler, since it has been 5 years with the same heatsink. I don't quite remember, but do the stock cooler's supplied by Intel come with thermal paste?

[GoNz0]

might be the cpu fan spinning slow ?

[Kaged]

Yep 67*C if its just idling in the BIOS is high tbh, and yes if the warning is set to go off after it reaches 60*C or higher that would explain the beeping!

Is there much dust build up between the fan and heatsink? You could start by giving that a clean up if so and see if things improve. If its a stock cooler from Intel it will have a patch of thermal paste on the bottom of the heatsink, although its not the best thermal paste in the world its more than adequate, although it may have 'baked-on' a bit with age, may need to re-apply some thermal paste (clean it up first though)

And as GoNz0 says, check the fan is spinning fast enough (should tell you the speed in the BIOS)

[killermillergb]

could be ram is not in correctly or you have nocked a wire out of somthing and now your pc is winging to have it put it back in.
just go round all connectors to make sure they are all in correctly