uug-ers
Got an interesting one here - My parents machine has recently given them fits - even more so than one would expect for a windows machine. It eventually completely refused to boot. I was pretty sure it was a bad hard drive, do to the inability to re-format and re-install to that drive (and the fact that it was an IBM drive with known failure issues).
However, a brand new maxtor drive has failed to solve anything - the machine is back to failing to boot after only one day (is this a windows failure record?)
Does anyone have some suggestions for diagnostic tools to check out the hard drive, ram, power supply, motherboard, and/or anything else you can think of to test? I'd really like to figure out why this machine is failing, and I figure there has to be some open source / linux based tools that will do the job.
Knoppix <http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html> will give you a pretty good idea of whether or not it works. Just boot it up and try stuff. If stuff works the hardware is probably okay. If something doesn't work it might be hardware problem, but maybe not.
The Dell diagnostics will run on non-Dell machines. IBM techs use it. It's pretty thorough. You can build a CD with the diag tools on it, but I haven't done it so I can't tell you how. You can get them from support.dell.com, but you may need a Dell service tag to get in.
As for testing memory you could try MemTest86 <http://www.memtest86.com/>.
As for harddrive you could download the diag tools from IBM or Maxtor <http://maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm>. The Maxtor tools may work even if yours isn't a maxtor drive. I couldn't find the IBM tools.
-- Andrew Jorgensen
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