Getting rid of that stupid "Previous fan failure" beep

Hi everyone, felt I should share what I found out when fixing that
ridiculous "Previous fan failure" message that appears on boot on
certain Dell computers. I'm not claiming this is news, but it might
still be interesting to people with similar problems.

The computer in question is a Dell Dimension 4300 with a 1.6 GHz
processor, shipped in November 2001.

Ever since early 2002, the chassis/CPU fan of this computer had been
very, very loud. Kind of airplane-like. As you can imagine, this was
very annoying. The computer isn't mine though, it's my brother's, so I
left these sound problems alone. But this fall, I decided to do
something about the noise and get a new fan.

I checked the dimensions of the stock fan and bought a cheap silent
92mm fan, a Zalman ZM-F1. I mounted it in the computer (easy to mount,
though it was impossible to fully secure it with screws - I kind of
wedged it into a stable position). This did require a little bit of
soldering of the wires since Dell uses a proprietary contact for the
chassis/CPU fan, no big problem though.

As I turned on the computer, I received this infamous message:
"Alert! Previous fan failure.
Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility"
F1 worked well - Windows booted normally, games worked perfectly, etc
- I haven't experienced a single problem yet with the Zalman fan. And
it really is quiet. The computer's noise level is normal / below
normal. Very nice.

However, I still had to press F1 everytime I booted the computer -
accompanied by that annoying system speaker beep.

Did some Googling, and I looked at various options, none of which
helped. I didn't dare touch the actual hardware (i.e. remove jumpers
on the motherboard or short wires on the chassis fan). Cleaning the
System Events Log did nothing either, since this error message is
re-generated on boot, and there's no way to turn this "functionality"
off. Finally, however, I tried one tip which seemed rather stupid: I
switched off "Report Keyboard Errors" in the Dell BIOS.
Which worked perfectly =)
The beep is gone, the "Strike the F1 key to continue" thing is gone.
There's just a split-second flash of the "Alert! Previous fan
failure." text on the upper part of the screen, then the OS starts
loading. It's not even noticeable unless you're looking for it. No
need to press keys or anything. Nice!

This entire fan problem is beyond stupid, it's totally ****ed up. Same
goes for the fact that mainstream Dell motherboards were (are still?)
delivered with no temperature sensors. But at least my problem is
fixed now.

Many thanks to whoever it was that originally brought up the ignore
keyboard thing =)

/Torkel

(Torkel Lindgren) wrote in message . com...
Hi everyone, felt I should share what I found out when fixing that
ridiculous "Previous fan failure" message that appears on boot on
certain Dell computers. I'm not claiming this is news, but it might
still be interesting to people with similar problems.

The computer in question is a Dell Dimension 4300 with a 1.6 GHz
processor, shipped in November 2001.

Ever since early 2002, the chassis/CPU fan of this computer had been
very, very loud. Kind of airplane-like. As you can imagine, this was
very annoying. The computer isn't mine though, it's my brother's, so I
left these sound problems alone. But this fall, I decided to do
something about the noise and get a new fan.

I checked the dimensions of the stock fan and bought a cheap silent
92mm fan, a Zalman ZM-F1. I mounted it in the computer (easy to mount,
though it was impossible to fully secure it with screws - I kind of
wedged it into a stable position). This did require a little bit of
soldering of the wires since Dell uses a proprietary contact for the
chassis/CPU fan, no big problem though.

As I turned on the computer, I received this infamous message:
"Alert! Previous fan failure.
Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility"
F1 worked well - Windows booted normally, games worked perfectly, etc
- I haven't experienced a single problem yet with the Zalman fan. And
it really is quiet. The computer's noise level is normal / below
normal. Very nice.

However, I still had to press F1 everytime I booted the computer -
accompanied by that annoying system speaker beep.

Did some Googling, and I looked at various options, none of which
helped. I didn't dare touch the actual hardware (i.e. remove jumpers
on the motherboard or short wires on the chassis fan). Cleaning the
System Events Log did nothing either, since this error message is
re-generated on boot, and there's no way to turn this "functionality"
off. Finally, however, I tried one tip which seemed rather stupid: I
switched off "Report Keyboard Errors" in the Dell BIOS.
Which worked perfectly =)
The beep is gone, the "Strike the F1 key to continue" thing is gone.
There's just a split-second flash of the "Alert! Previous fan
failure." text on the upper part of the screen, then the OS starts
loading. It's not even noticeable unless you're looking for it. No
need to press keys or anything. Nice!

This entire fan problem is beyond stupid, it's totally ****ed up. Same
goes for the fact that mainstream Dell motherboards were (are still?)
delivered with no temperature sensors. But at least my problem is
fixed now.

Many thanks to whoever it was that originally brought up the ignore
keyboard thing =)

/Torkel

Depends on your point of view whether this is good or not.
Personally, using a third party fan means if it fails there's NO
warning of an overheat; and with Dell's large passive fan it would
take a while to overheat after the fan failed. YMMV.