After power on my desktop gives a long beep for about 5 seconds and after a silence of about a second or two the long beep continues and this goes on and on but the booting does not progress. Can anyone tell me the reason and the remedy please?

During the boot process, your computer does a self-examination. When an error condition is found, it emits a tone, or series of tones to alert you that a problem exists. These tones are called "post beeps," or something similar. Not knowing what brand computer you have, I can only guess that the tone is an indication of problems with your memory. You can actually Google the beeps. For example "Dell post beeps" will result in several links that may lead you to the listing of tones related to your computer. Have a great day!

As mentioned, these are post codes indicating a problem (usually with memory (ram))

What model computer do you have (BIOS if you know it) and also, try to get the exact sequence of beeps
Ex.. 1 long, 2 short, 1 long