I attempted to add a secondary hard drive, did so, truned it back on and got 3 long beeps, no monitor action, removed the secondary, turned it back on w/ the original that hadnt been moved and still got three long beeps w/ no monitor action at all. What do I do to it?

Hey
Assumption
You have a PC connected to a monitor.
Now the PC is beeping and there is no display at your monitor

PC beeping most likely can be of the RAM.

1) Switch OFF PC and Main Switch
2) Give the motherboard to discharge (5 minutes)
3) Use a anti-static wrist strip
4) Remove RAM
a) Do not touch the connections of the ram with bare hands
b) Use compress air spray in short blasts to clean the connections and RAM slots
c) Make sure this is done in a well lighted environment. You can trace the dust and remove it with an anti-static cloth.
5) Put RAM inside the slots
6) Switch ON

If above fails
1) Try replacing either your RAMs or PC with a friend's good working conditions.

Please note, since you are removing your RAMs, anything and everything can happen. So be careful and hope for the best.

Another way
Get your hard drive into your friends working PC as a secondary and transfer the data into an external hdd. This way your data is saved.

atb

Here are Few steps which can use to trouble shoot your laptop no display problem.

1. Connect a VGA cable for external monitor and check if you can see any display on External Monitor.
2.Take out your RAM and Clean it with Pencil Eraser and Put it back. If Possible try with different RAM,
3. Remove your Hard Drive and Try switching on Laptop without the Hard Drive.
4. Make sure that you are using proper Adapter with proper Voltage.

During the boot up process are there any beeps? If so how many short or long? 1 short beep is typical of a normal boot indicating no conflicts. What you can also do is unplug or remove any unnecessary peripherals (i.e. Hard drive, cd drive, any expansion cards) So that all you have is the the power supply, monitor cable, motherboard, cpu, and memory plugged in and attempt to boot. If this is successful add one peripheral at a time and boot again untill the boot fails again. This will usually indicate a problem with the power supply, either its faulty or not providing enough wattage to support all the peripherals, otherwise its a conflict with the specific peripheral that causes the failure. IF none of that works attempt to reseat all your connections, cpu socket, memory socket, power supply, and video cable. If all that still fails it is most likely a bad motherboard, its not unheard of to receive a DOA motherboard. As a last ditch attempt you can determine is a faulty video chip or the motherboard itself by installing a pci video card and seeing if its successfully boots.

Hello-

Welcome to FixYa, the world's largest product support community.

Most of the time if a Desktop computer turns on but you see nothing on the screen,
It may be an issue w/ the monitor or it's cable connection.

Please verify that the monitor cable is connected to the correct port. By default the Dell™ Inspiron™ 530 only comes w/ a VGA monitor port (built-in graphics adapter) at the back unless you installed a discrete graphics adapter on the computer.

If the monitor is connected to the correct port then you might consider running a monitor Power-on Self Test (P.O.S.T).

How to do a Monitor Power-on Self Test (P.O.S.T)
1. Unplug the monitor's data cable, this is the cable that goes to the back of your computer tower.
If you are using an old monitor most likely you have a VGA monitor. Unplug the VGA cable.
2. Make sure the monitor's power cable is plugged in.
3. Turn the computer on.



Fig. 1. Sample Monitor Power-On Self Test.



Fig. 2. Sample Monitor Power-On Self Test.

If these troubleshooting steps doesn't help. Please reply to this post as we may need to go through more troubleshooting steps.


Regards,


Deathschythe

Hi,

Yes, you can add additional hard drive.Please follow the below steps to add the drive sucessfully.

STEP 1:

Make sure you have room for an extra hard drive, here's one way to do this:

1. Restart your computer and go into the BIOS menu as per below instruction.
Steps to enter BIOS:
After turning ON, immediately press the F10 key if your computer was built in 2006 or later (came with Vista). Press the F1 key if your computer was built before 2006 (XP or earlier). Press the key once every second until a BIOS Setup utility screen opens.
2. Go to the "Standard CMOS Settings."
3. In this menu, you will find four settings labeled as follows: PRIMARY MASTER:, AUTO/PRIMARY SLAVE:, SECONDARY MASTER:, SECONDARY SLAVE:. Change all fields to auto detection.
4. Reboot your computer.
5. On the first or second screen, you will see something like the screen above and it will say detecting (drive(prim/sec)) : (name of the drive if present). If any of them say none, remember which drive it is. If all of them have a drive name, all your bays are filled and you can't add a new hard drive without removing a disk drive or hard drive. Consider making an external USB drive.

STEP 2:

1.Shut down your computer.
2.Unplug all of the cords from the back of your computer and pull the computer out from the desk.
3.Remove the case screws. If you're having difficulty, it's a good idea to consult your manual on how your particular case is removed. Put the screws in a safe place so you don't lose them. Remove the side panel and place it out of the way.
4.Find the area where all the flat ribbon cables (or SATA cables, which are smaller and usually red) connect to the main board. Find the cable that corresponds to the free drive either primary or secondary.

STEP 3:

1.Set the jumpers so the drive knows whether to act as a master or slave. The jumpers are the set of pins on the back of the hard drive. They'll have a couple of rubber or plastic blocks covering some pins. Find the diagram or instructions for your new drive on to set the jumper for the master/slave.
2.Find the empty bay in your computer case. Using the screws that came with the drive or computer case, mount the drive.
3.Connect the cable to the hard drive. If it won't go in, make sure that the safety bump is aligned with the hole.
4.Connect a Molex power cable, (a smaller connector with red, yellow, and black wires.)
5.Put the side panel back on the computer and put the screws back in.
6.Plug all of the cables back into the rear of the computer, and connect them to their power sources if you unplugged them.
7.Boot up the computer. Go into your BIOS at startup.Check the BIOS auto detect to ensure the second drive is detected. On the screen that shows that primary master/slave,secondary master/slave you should see the name of your new hard drive.


Thanks & Regards
Rizwan.

From Control Panel go to Add/Remove Programs

Remove programs that no longer useful to you and delete documents, pictures any file that you don't need anymore.
if you don't have nothing to do with removing programs and deleting files, you have to upgrade or add a secondary hard drive, or a external drive will be a helpful to you, move all your files to your external drive this will also counted as your backup files.

Unplug power from the machine for a period of 5-10 minutes.

Plug it back in and attempt to boot. Carefully notice if there are any beeps again, and listen for pauses in between. Dell beep codes go in a three pulse pattern I.E. 4-Slight Pause-4-Slight Pause-2-Pause/ and repeat.

After this, you may have to open your machine and assure that everything is well connected.

There is a chance however that a major system component has failed and needs to be replaced.

Hope this helps.

reset your bios settings put cmos cell for 15 minutes. also u can reset bios with jumper settings.
then remove meory card then check beep.
then connect allconnection then try.u can do it man.

I had this trouble had to reset BIOS to default then it worked but would either recognize IDE drive and not SATA remove IDE SATA was recognized
Its something in the BIOS setup As I do not know your BIOS you will have to check it out with *********** board manual how to do it to setup both drives

The intermittent beeping is the error code. It is important that you notice how many beeps your computer makes.
Then, you can go to the following link (from HP) http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bph07107&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=71010&lang=en
and check what is wrong with your computer.

Anyway, you can always recover the information on your computer, but will have to take the hard disk out of the computer and plug it onto another as a secondary hard disk.