[ltp] three beeps at bootup?

[Seth Kulick]

Hi,

I have a T30 that's coming up on 3 years old, and I'm getting a little
nervous about its reliability.  It had a system board replaced about a year
ago, but other than there have been almost no problems.  it's a dual boot,
with XP/Redhat 8.0

The only problems have had to do with linux. (although I almost never
run it with windows).  Once in a while if I leave it untouched for 
a while - about 1/2 hour or so - it will freeze up.  Most of the time this
doesn't happen, but just every so often.  The other day something new 
happened.  I had closed it so it went into suspend, and then opened it
up, and it didn't come back to life.  (It was on AC when it went into
suspend, and on AC when I opened it.).  I held the power switch and
rebooted, and then on reboot just got three beeps and nothing happened.
Not even the windows boot manager (I have it set up so that I modified
BOOT.INI, so that Linux is one of the choices from the Windows boot.)
I waited a minute, tried again, and it worked.

Today, when booting it up from a power-down state, I got the three beeps
again.  I tried again, and it worked okay.  I'm wondering if it is perhaps
a power issue.  Before trying it again, I took out the battery and then
put it back.  I am not sure if the first time it was on battery power
and then when I retried it it was on AC.  I was  a bit frazzled when it
didn't boot up so I'm unclear.

But has anybody had any experience with the three beeps and die at 
power on?  What does it mean?  I realize this isn't a specifically
linux question, so my apologies. I think this thing is still under
warranty, so I'm just trying to gather information before calling IBM.
thanks.


Seth