Dell Diagnostic Beep Code Troubleshooting Chart

Those beeps your computer emits at startup, yea, they mean something. If you’re having difficulty figuring out why your Dell desktop, tower, or mini tower won’t boot, take a look at this chart. Dell also has a diagnostics utility and can provide excellent technical support, sometimes. Try F12 (or F11 or F2) during the boot. The numbers and hyphens mean exactly what’s listed. For example, the sequence 1-1-2 means beep, beep, beep-beep. Some issues are caused by owner carelessness, others require hardware replacement. If you’re unsure, either Google further, or contact Dell Technical Support.
Dell Beep Code Meanings
1-1-2 Processor Register Failure
1-1-3 NVRam
1-1-4 ROM Bios checksum failure
1-2-1 Programmable Interval Timer
1-2-2 DMA Initialization Failure
1-2-3 Direct Memory Access Page Register Read/Write Failure
1-3-1 - 2-4-4 Memory/RAM Not Properly Identified or Used
3-1-1 Slave DMA Registration Failure
3-1-2 Master DMA Registration Failure
3-1-3 Master Interrupt Mask Registration Failure
3-1-4 Slave Interrupt Mask Registration Failure
3-2-2 Interrupted Vector Loading Failure
3-2-4 Keyboard Controller (Input) Test Failure
3-3-1 NVRam Insufficient Power
3-3-2 Improperly configured NVRam
3-3-4 Video Memory(RAM) Test Failure
3-4-1 Screen Output Initialization Failure
3-4-2 Screen Retrace Failure
3-4-3 Failure Finding Video Read Only Memory
4-2-1 Lack of Time Tick
4-2-2 Shutdown Failure
4-2-3 Failure in Gate A20
4-2-4 Unexpected Interruption in Protect Mode
4-3-1 Memory Address Failure above 0FFFFH
4-3-4 Non Functioning Time Of Day Clock
4-4-1 Serial And/Or Parallel Port Test Failure
4-4-4 Cache Test Failure