x86 diagnostic tools

free or open source system diagnostic tools for the x86 platform

"My Winxx box has been crashing hard lately, and I haven't the slightest clue why. Up until tonight I didn't care (too much) because rebooting it 'made it all go away.' Well tonight it finally wouldn't boot at all, before I even had the option to hit F8 it said that it couldn't load the kernel: 'could not load kernel. reason: load dlls failed, contact your support person.' Not even a BSOD-- just right after POST it would display this error.

I want to know what went wrong. Was this some Windoze snafu or do I have a piece of failing hardware?" --Robert Rose 10/2002

hard disk diagnostic tools

• badblocks
  
  The Linux tool badblocks is a thorough block-by-block disk scanner. It has two modes of testing: read and read/write. In read mode it verifies that your disk can be read from every single block available on the disk. In read/write mode, *which is destructive*, it writes several different patterns to each block on the disk and verifies that it can be read back. badblocks is extremely time-consuming (obviously) but is the only way you can determine if your disk is fully functioning.
  
  The easiest way to run badblocks is to download a bootable ISO image that has the badblocks tool on it and run it against your hard disk(s). If you're already running Linux on the system, you can not run badblocks on a disk you have booted off of (the disk can't be mounted), so if you want to check your boot disk you'll have to reboot from CD or some other means.
  
  To obtain an ISO image with badblocks, I recommend the Linux Crash Recovery Kit distribution, available at www.crashrecovery.org. Download the CRK ia32 2.4.18 ISO image and burn it onto a CDR, then boot your system from it.
  
  To do a simple read test against your disk run the command badblocks -sv. If your system is crashing and you want to rule our your disk however, this is not good enough, you'll need to do a read/write test.
  
  To do a full-blown read/write test against your disk run badblocks -svw. WARNING: This is a destructive operation and will erase your entire disk!
  
  

memory diagnostic tools

• Memtest86
  
  Memtest86 is a Gnu Public License tool for thoroughly testing all of the memory installed in a system. It is available as a Win32 application, Linux application, and a bootable ISO image.
  
  To run Memtest86 visit www.memtest86.com and download the Memtest86 v3.0 ISO image, burn it onto CDR and boot from it. Memtest86 will automatically run through all of your RAM running all of it's tests.

cpu diagnostic tools

• cpuburn
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