Black Screen and Single Beep at Startup

I started my laptop (m17x r4) and it is giving me a black screen with a single beep. The keyboard lights up and the fans turn on, but nothing additional. I found in the beep codes this is a system bios or ROM error. I tried unseating the back 2 ram sticks (reseating and booting without, I had all 4 dimms filled), no change. Pulled the CMOS batter and held down the power key for 30 seconds to reset the BIOS, with no change.

Any other ideas? I just moved so i'm waiting to grab a screwdriver from a friend (none of my tools are here yet), so I can mess with the front ram sticks.

I was thinking of blind flashing the bios (not sure what to, I haven't updated and the laptop was purchased with the launch of the the 7970 card).

Any other ideas?

 

Single beep, huh? Can you get your hands on an external monitor and plug it in to test if just the LCD went bad. My R2 beeps once during post (three times if the systems is running on battery power). I've considered it to be normal. Another thing to look at is the CAP/NUM/SCROLL lights on the upper left of the keyboard. I they are flashing, then the system is giving you an LED code as well. Here is the table to decipher it: http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/kcs/document?docid=266797

 

this usually happens to me when i overclock and its unstable(cpu and gpu)

but i do get the bios loading screen, but crashes and beeps(one loud beep) before loading windows

all i do is disable the overclocking feature in bios, restore to default and i am good to go!


sounds familiar? do you get the bios loading screen?

 

Thanks for the replays so far. Still looking for my monitor in my stuff (movers just dropped it off today).

I haven't overclocked the system at all and it doesn't attempt to even post (at least not that I can see).

 

You have tried pretty much everything that can be done and we might need to take a look to your system. Please send us an e-mail to [email protected] with your tag, phone and a brief description of the issue and we'll get back to you aSAP.