[mdlug] Hardware diagnostic SW

[Jonathan Billings]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 12:38:14PM -0800, David Lane wrote:
>
> The CD-Rom might have problems.  I can test that on another system
> as well as the hard drive 

It's unlikely that a CPU fan failure would lead to a CD drive to
fail.  It's more likely that if the motherboard is damaged, the IDE
controller on the motherboard isn't working.  Moving the CD drive into
another system to test is an excellent idea.

Depending on the manufacturer, there are a variety of testing suites
for hardware.  Since I have a lot of Dell (server) hardware, I always
keep around one of their Dell 32 bit diagnistic disks, which you can
download from support.dell.com for free.  It can do tests for many of
the subsystems in a Dell.

As for general testing, it might be worth trying Memtest86+
(http://www.memtest.org/).  If you consistant errors for a particular
part of memory, it's probably the memory that's bad.  If you get
random errors all over the memory, and they differ between passes, the
CPU or motherboard is likely to be bad.  If it hangs completely, the
same might be true.

You can also boot the system off a LiveCD of some sort, such as
Knoppix (http://knoppix.net/), which will grant you access to a lot of
testing tools for things like your disks ('badblocks') or filesystems
('fsck').

The important thing is finding errors that you can *reproduce* and
narrow down to a particular subsystem.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>