My 360 goes "beep"...

[hex65000]

Well, its time for another gripping episode of "What the heck is going on here!?"

 

After playing games on the 360 I picked up a while ago I've been really getting into it. Now the unit occasionally beeps. Nothing bad happens. It just beeps nor can I correlate it with anything meaningful in terms of what could cause it. I did a Google search and found other reports of the problem occurring, but nothing meaningful in terms of the root cause. That and the various smart ass remarks that after similar post 15 I was having the urge to use a hammer on forum users.

 

Anyway, I have two guesses as to what's happening, but maybe someone here can help narrow things down. My first guess is that a fan is starting to seize up and the system is saying "Alert! a fan has stopped turning or is turning at below the threshold speed. The other guess is that it's an over temperature alarm. I'd buy into this, but the system continues to operate normally regardless of the beeping. I also have my system out in the open where it has adequate room to 'breathe'. The beeping is clearly not anything like a singing capacitor or a bum hard disk. I've had enough experience with both to know those noises. Anyone else having this happen on AA? Even though the diagnosis is sketchy, the problem is real. I figure the answer will crop up eventually.

 

Sounds like something from the X-Files.

 

Hex.

[ Has spent a ton of money on gaming stuff... Curse you addictive behavior! ]

[SoulBlazer]

I'm not sure what to tell you. I've had 360's that have messed up graphics, lock ups, and have been very noisy, but no beeps.

 

Stupid question -- have you tried calling MS tech support?

[Video]

Does it do it on startup, or randomly during gameplay? Just wondering, cause on startup, computers will beep to tell a status, but a service person would really be needed to know what it is.

 

Could be the same during operation, but it would likely be harder to track down. Anything commonly happen when it does this? Like hear a fan start up, or quit, or maybe a drive kicks in? (if you got a HDD hooked up that is)

[hex65000]

Every once in a while during gameplay. If you do a google search, you can find a few forums where people are having this happen but like I said above, half of the replies are "It's a bomb", "your 360 is sentient", "mine died soon after", etc... It's happened while I'm playing games and while on the dashboard. But nobody has come back with a diagnosis on what's causing it to happen. If the system wasn't so failure prone and all the void warranty stickers, I'd just bust this baby open and fix it proper. <sigh>

 

I'm thinking about adding a 120V fan to suck air out of the case to help get the temperature even further down. Since everything involves KNex I can cage the fan up pretty easily.

 

Hex.

[ Unfortunately, few problems are truly solved with cheesecake... ]

[hex65000]

I may have gotten a clue on this today...

 

I was teaching my lab section and one of the students has a portable USB laptop drive that he stores all his stuff on.

 

It wasn't behaving well, and then it went beep. In a similar way that my 360 went beep. I'm very surprised that it was coming from a hard drive, but the behavior and tone were dead on. Soo... it's possible that my 20GB drive is going bye-bye a little early.

 

What are my options here? Obviously the MS brand drives are super overpriced for a lot of nothing. And I really am not big on paying out for DLC items so there's not a ton on my drive. I do want to transfer off the saves though and my profile as it stands. Am I just stuck paying too much for a tiny hard disk and that's the end of the story?

 

Hex.

[ Isn't panicing yet... everything is still working... ]

[Video]

Yeah, the prices are obscene. If you don't do much online, you can hack it and run a different drive in it, but I'm not even going there, cause I don't know how it works and the last two systems I tried on, died You might can get a used drive fairly inexpensively (compared'to getting a new one that is) As for transfering data, if you got a friend with one, you can copy most saves over, and your profile to their system, or maybe they got a memory card, then copy it back to your system from the memory card, or thenetwork cable.

 

For a simple fix,you may try just pulling the drive and plugging it back in. It's possible that it's just in crooked or something. I've had mine fail to boot cause it wasn't plugged in all the way.

[moycon]

You can snag a 20GB drive off eBay for like $25 shipped if you suspect the drive. I agree with Video tho, an easy test would be to play for a bit without the drive.