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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 |
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