Thursday, October 14, 2010

Macbook Pro cannot boot up with continuous beep and black screen

Today my colleague told me that his 13" macbook pro (2009 ver.) cannot boot up with black screen. After taking a look, I found that it even gives out crazily annoying beep sound continuously (beep-beep-beep, halt, beep-beep-beep, halt, ......). I have not met that before and turned to Google for help. After some looking and trying (at some time I thought it is because a disc stuck in the drive), finally I found a few sources all point out that the 3-beep sound means "bad memory". The colleague then tried taking the two 1-GB RAM in and out to test and BINGO! The problem was caused by one single faulty RAM! So I will know what to do if any of my machine gives me that sound......

Update: One of my friends told me just now those beep sounds are called "beep code" and their meanings are dependent to different BIOS. A reference of Mac machines can be found here.
Update: Another reference in Wikipedia.

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