MacBook Air long single beep at startup. then nothing

I was using my two and a half-year old MacBook Air this afternoon when first the cursor disappeared and then all function was lost. I restarted and the apple screen with the spinning gear appeared. I restarted a few more time. On the third or fourth time a long, single beep was added. I tried safe start up, I ran a simple hardware check.

I've been a Mac owned since 1987 and love troubleshooting in general, not that I have had to often. I am running a deep hardware check right now. I have not had the tiniest bit of trouble with this unit since I bought it.

Is there anything else I can do on my own before calling the service?

Thanks in advance,

Gracious Ford

Update: While running the deep hardware test, the screen went black.

The one long beep sounds like a RAM issue which is bad because on the Air the RAM is soldered to the logic board.

On the screen going black with extended hardware test, did you wait a bit for it to come back?

I agree with dtravis7, it does sound like a memory issue which he pointed out is not good. As the 2 GB of memory is soldered on to the logic board, there is no way to remove it and test. Probably time to take it on in to Apple. The screen going black during the extended hardware test is another indicator.

Regards.

Thank you very much. I talked with a friend who is an Apple rep and he said the same thing, so Monday bright and early I will go in to the service center.

Now I ask this with my eyes clenched shut: what can I expect in terms of data lost or saved? I have the important things back up, except for the last many hours of edits to my three novels...(I can edit again, but still, I was hoping to begin podcasting the first one in September.)

The good news is that if it is indeed the logic board, this should mean your hard drive is completely unaffected. From what you've told us so far, I would not be overly concerned about your data.

PS. And if you had been using Time Machine as you should have been, this would be a complete non-issue. Time to re-evaluate your backup strategy IMHO.