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Some motherboards have a built-in display to diagnose hardware problems. Most also report POST errors with audible beeps, if a PC speaker is attached. Such motherboards make POST cards less necessary. When these diagnostic cards were first introduced motherboards were expensive and well worth troubleshooting and repairing.
Troubleshooting is a form of problem solving, often applied to repair failed products or processes on a machine or a system. It is a logical, systematic search for the source of a problem in order to solve it, and make the product or process operational again. Troubleshooting is needed to identify the symptoms.
Power supply, system board problem, disconnected CPU, or disconnected speaker Continuous beep: Power supply, system board, RAM or keyboard problem Repeating short beeps: Power supply, system board or keyboard problem 1 long, 1 short beep: System board problem 1 long, 2 short beeps: Display adapter problem (MDA, CGA) 1 long, 3 short beeps
Intermittent faults are notoriously difficult to identify and repair ("troubleshoot") because each individual factor does not create the problem alone, so the factors can only be identified while the malfunction is actually occurring. The person capable of identifying and solving the problem is seldom the usual operator.
In semiconductor devices, problems in the device package may cause failures due to contamination, mechanical stress of the device, or open or short circuits. Failures most commonly occur near the beginning and near the ending of the lifetime of the parts, resulting in the bathtub curve graph of failure rates.
[73] [74] The problems are characterized by a blank, staticky, or grayscale video output with a proper functioning audio output and no flashing red lights on the console. The complete video failure is sometimes preceded by other graphical glitches such as an irregular saturation of green and/or red colors.
The debugger can then be used to examine the contents of memory and determine the source of the problem. A BSoD can also be caused by a critical boot loader error, where the operating system is unable to access the boot partition due to incorrect storage drivers, a damaged file system or similar problems.
As such, the MRC is a part of the BIOS (or firmware) of an Intel motherboard. George Chen, a research and development (R&D) director at ASUS , described it in 2007 as follows: [ 1 ] The MRC is part of reference BIOS code, which relates to memory initialization in the BIOS.