Thanks to all.

(1)Bill Cohane's (clipped):-

<<<Since you hear beeps when the chassis speaker is disconnected, I assume that your motherboard has one of these built in speakers.>>>

well... i thought or assumed that the sound came from the hdd and said so in my earlier post. now i really have a foolish look in my face. yes there is a black hollow cylinder as described by you and worse there is the "SPEAKER" written by the side (visible only with a magnifying glass )

<<<<indicating that one of the motherboard's built in thermal diodes has 
detected a higher than allowed temperature or that an out of range DC 
voltage has been detected>>>>

i changed the PS to check the voltage part of it but still the mobo speaker makes the same noise. re. the temp. part of the thermal diode i think i will have to consult a specialist since this is beyond my present range of knowledge/tools. tks anyway.

Hugh Vandervoort's post:--<<<What is the motherboard model number? 
Have you checked the bios for any warning parameters?>>>>

the model is P4GE-MX but i do not think this will be of much help unless you go to the asian region site of ASUS since most of the hardware vendors make different models for different regions (or give a different model name)

the bios does not show anything unusual as far as i can see.

Richard Glazier's post:-

<<<<What do you hear if you boot from floppy or CD, and does the noise stop? 
What do you hear if you boot from floppy with the HD disconnected?>>>

same noise booting from a floppy with/ without the HDD.did not try the cd route though.

finally a thorough look at the mobo showed that one portion of the sort of four pillars(fixed on to the mobo)surrounding the cpu and provided to hold the heatsink/fan had come loose. i fixed it firmly in place and seated the heatsink/fan but still the noise did not stop. after about 4 hours i got frustrated and shut down.

when i tried to reboot next day morning it refused to boot from the drive and instead went on to the known bad drive with win xp( which was slaved) and just froze!

i powered down and removed the slave and booted and up came a msg saying my drive did not have a valid f32 partition, or partitioned with third party software or possible virus....etc etc.

in frustration i fdisked and tried to repartition and at the "verifying drive integrity stage" the siren started and the verification went on for 6 hours with siren on. after that at the "set active partition stage" it again started the drive integrity verification and went on and on and on.

as of now i have just powered it down and am thinking of slaving the drive to my other standby system and hopefully troubleshoot successfully.

TIA in case any of you feel like giving some input.

good day---Venkat

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