Hard drive for testing and diagnostic work

camel lips

New Member
How many of you guys out there that check computers for a living have a drive loaded only with Windows operating system and virus tools that they use to test and diagnose computer hardware with ???

Also is there a good program you can buy that at start up of the computer that will go through your system and determine what settings you have set may be messing up your computer?I am talking about a diagnostic tool and not antivirus.I would need a diagnostic tool that can tell me what hardware issues may be in the computer.

I am pretty well up to date on the whole antivirus thing.

Thanks
 
Are you talking about a prebuilt Hard drive with Xp on, and then using that to connect to different systems and booting from it? cos 9 times out of 10 that wont work because of Windows HAL system, chances are you wont be able to boot because the hardware table that it keeps will differ from the hardware in the system your using.

Forgive me if thats not what your talking about.
 
I work in a Service department and we all have shop machines that we can hook customer hard drives to to do virus scans, check that the drive is readable, perform data recovery, and run hd diagnostics if they won't run on the clients machine.

As far as a general hardware diagnostic tool, we use Quicktech Pro as a general all-purpose tool, then run harddrive test (manufacturer specific [or use DFT]), then memtest32+

Of course, no diagnostics will ever be 100%. We had one of our technicians ran memtest on a machine over the weekend (something like 360 passes) and showed no errors, yet the issue was still with the RAM. Once he swapped the stick out, it booted and ran fine. If you can't trust a diagnostic tool, who can you trust??!! LOL
 
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