[Discuss] OT - HDD light blinks in a pattern with audio before bootup

[Jerry Feldman]

Not sure. If you hit esc in the splash screen you will see text. And you
will see where it stopped. There are 4 processes
1. Post. This is the bios.
2. Kernel and drivers. This usually takes a few seconds
3. System Daemons. This should be quick.
4. Everything else not kernel related including the desktop.

Step 4 is probably where you are blocking.

If you don't post. The issue is on the MB. Could be a plugin card or
memory.
If the kernel fails you will get a crash notice


--
Jerry Feldman <gaf.linux at gmail.com>
Boston Linux and Unix http://www.blu.org
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On Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 9:49 PM Edward <epp at sillydog.org> wrote:

> One of my desktops (HP Compaq CQ5110F) briefly failed this evening,
> while trying to determine why the HDD light blinks in a pattern (blip,
> blip (pause) blip) several times, with pops coming from the speakers at
> the exact same time, before the BIOS screen appears when it's powered on
> every time. I determined that it was the PCI-E x16 Radeon video card I
> installed, am using that because nouveau doesn't seem to want to play
> nice with Linux. During the investigative phase before the system
> failed, from the BIOS, I ran both the short and extended SMART tests on
> the HDD and they completed without any errors.
>
> After removing and re-seating everything not fastened down
> (video/network/RAM) and resetting the CMOS, the system came back up but
> (l)ubuntu wouldn't fully boot up, there was some slow HDD activity, but
> it did not get past the splash screen after 15 minutes. I then
> reinstalled (l)ubuntu, which took no more than 10 minutes and it now
> fully boots up again.
>
> I ruled out everything else, but am curious as to whether there might be
> a particular reason why the HDD light blinks like this with the presence
> of the video card.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
>
> --
> If it doesn't work right out of the box, they're in the wrong business.
>
>
>
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