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Hardware

Diagnostic Tools for Testing 2nd Hand Machines? 46

Posted by Cliff from the run-it-thru-its-paces-before-you-buy-it dept.
tom asks: "Buying second hand computers you always run a risk. I was wondering if the slashdot readers could suggest a toolbox of (preferably small) tools that you could take along with you on one or two floppy's so you could run some diagnostics on machines you would consider buying. I'm thinking of the checkdisks, benchmark programs, soundcard checks, USB checks etc."
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Diagnostic Tools for Testing 2nd Hand Machines? More

Diagnostic Tools for Testing 2nd Hand Machines?

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  • How about a linux or freebsd bootdisk?

    • My suggestion is an ancient DOS program called Troubleshooter. (ts.exe)

      It fits on a floppy, boots, tells you all sorts of stuff, including checking CD-ROM drives, multimedia, video cards, convergence and purity checks for monitors in various modes, everything.

      Does memory, CPU, bus tests, hard disk tests.

      The only problem is that it's older than Pentium MMX, and I've never seen a newer version. It identifies a Pentium, including the speed, but not MMX. I tried it on a 500MHz Celeron, and it told me that I had a 760MHz Pentium. I tried it on a 1.5 GHz Athlon and it told me that I had a 2500MHz K6.

      It's less useful for IDing machines now, but it's still great for doing hardware tests.

  • Bootable Linux (Score:3, Informative)

    by pythorlh ( 236755 ) <pythor AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday August 06, 2002 @11:33AM (#4018432) Journal
    Maybe one of href=http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/04/0 00205&mode=nested&tid=106

  • Well now. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Neck_of_the_Woods ( 305788 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2002 @11:37AM (#4018454) Journal
    The best bet that I have found with buying systems that are used, in bulk is just to go ahead and assume that they are all broke. Assume nothing is going to work right, and factor in how much it is going to cost you in time to get something working and if it is worth it. I had the luck of running up on about 20 p2 systems a year back and purchased them for 30 bucks each, assuming that everything in them was hosed and the most I could get out of them was one or 2 parts on average. I got more on most, 1/2 had failed drives was the biggest problem. Followed by hosed motherboards. All in all I got about 12 full systems out of the 20, and gave them away like candy to people I knew that needed them. Ended up keeping 3 for myself. It all ended well, but assume they are hosed and you will not end up on the short end.

    Good luck,

  • ZipSlack perhaps? http://www.slackware.com

  • memtest (Score:2, Informative)

    by kraf ( 450958 )
    see subj.
    • Somebody mod this guy up! This is most definitely not flamebait - he's referring to a tool called memtest.

  • memtest86 (Score:3)

    by josepha48 ( 13953 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2002 @11:43AM (#4018501) Journal
    if you are buying intel hardware memtest86 is probably the best thing to start with. (http://www.memtest86.com/)

    This will check the compuiter memory but may take a while.

    Also you could LInux on a floppy or NetBSD/FreeBSD/Linux on a cdrom and see how it detects the hardware, by looking at the outputs of dmesg, and a few other things like that.

  • MemTest86 [memtest86.com]
    This is an memory tester that boots from a floppy. I use it frequently, and it works very well - a must-have for a testing toolkit.
  • My .5 cents.

    If you manage to get a --on floppy or --on cd distro, make sure you have a compiler and enough room to extract the linux kernel sources, and watch out for signal 11.

    It's usually a goot burn test/benchmark of disk/cpu/memory.

  • Your brain - then some very basic tools (Score:3, Informative)

    by ivan256 ( 17499 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2002 @12:43PM (#4018973)
    I don't know about it fitting on a floppy disk, but the best thing you can bring along is in your head already. Base the price you're going to pay on what the terms of the deal are. As is, no refunds? Assume they're all broken, and price accordingly. Guaranteed working? For how long? Again, base your price mainly on the terms, not on the equipment.

    After that, there are some simple things you can do to find out what you're getting, assuming they'll let you test every unit. I've written some shell scripts the I've got in an initrd with busybox that I burned to a CD that tells you if the machine can boot, and if so, what hardwhere is in it. It looks for PCI devices, SCSI disks, IDE disks, memory... Basically any info you can pull out of proc. It formats it all nicely on a single screen, so you don't need to type anything, and you spend 45 seconds at a machine max. There's no need for a full OS with apps, or a bootable distribution. I have a single floppy version as well, but it won't find every SCSI device. If you'd like a copy, send me an e-mail.
  • IMHO the most likely things to be salvaged from an old PC are the case and power supply. Make sure the case will take a new ATX motherboard, and be sure the power supply has enough oomph to run the new motherboard.

    Others might quibble about testing the existing (small) hard drives, floppy drive, and CD-ROM, but I'd just count on trashing these items. They're cheap and plentiful new. Besides, if you're buying massive numbers of machines to administer in a giant cluster, you probably don't need or want any removable media on each machine.

    Same goes for whatever existing motherboards might be in the machines. If they're a couple years old you'd probably have to go hunting around the net to find BIOS updates etc. to make them work with your peripherals. It's not worth the time, especially with decent new motherboards available for a half-hour's pay.


  • Spin-Rite checks HD's

    An older Norton Utilities (mid-90's) should do the trick for other items

    Micro-Scope [millennium...ions.co.uk]tool kit works great for most anything you can think of
  • Bring along a DOS 6.22 boot disk. It contains several useful commands, including chkdsk (check disk), dir (detect incorrect RAM), command (complete machine diagnostics) and fc (fix computer). Happy hunting!
  • Most of the posts that I've seen so far pertain to Intel based systems, but I know I've had this question a number of times when I was looking at systems that weren't Intel based. Does anyone have suggestions concerning the rest of the hardware out there???

    • Its all pretty specific to each system then, but my advice would be learn the system report command for each OS that you are interested in purchasing, since most of them originally had an OS you can learn quite a bit about the internals. Also learn the ideosyncracies of the manufacturer's comps. I had a friend with a perfectly good Alpha that's network card was only recognised under WindowsNT, because it wasn't the original DEC card. Also you generally cant pick up proprietary stuff for nearly as cheap (under about $200) as old intel stuff, unless its total crap.
      • Sounds about right, Your suggestion is basically what I've been doing, I just wanted to find out if maybe I was missing something simple. I know they used to put out POST cards for Intel systems, that you could plug into the MB, and when you powered the system up, it would attempt to test most of the hardware on the MB. At this point though the hardware present on the MB is so varied, etc. that I haven't seen many of those POST cards in recent years. I thought maybe there was something similar for the other hardware bases. Thanks.

  • SETI@home (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rainer_d ( 115765 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2002 @02:12PM (#4019717) Homepage
    If you have the time, try running the SETI@home-client for 24h - and then install FreeBSD, make world, compile KDE3, mozilla and OpenOffice from ports.
    (>6 GB disk-space needed, though)

    SETI will bring the CPU to the limit. If it's overclocked and/or badly cooled or otherwise unstable, you'll see that quickly.

    The rest will stress-test your IO-capabilities ;-)

    If it survives all that, then it looks like you can trust the system quite a bit.

    Rainer
    • Insightful?

      If you're buying second hand computers, there's a good chance they might not be the latest and greatest. You might not have 24 hours to run SETI@Home. Swap meet, for example.

      What if you can't connect to the internet to get a SETI data set? What if you don't have the hardware for installing Linux, KDE, etc etc?

      • Well,
        don't blame me for other people's points...

        I did say "_if_ you have the time"...
        My old P200MMX has got some heat-problems which are only visible after some hours of make world.
        I haven't tried, but I guess a simple memtest86 wouldn't do here.
        And if you buy @ebay, this whole article is useless, because you can't even touch the box until UPS or whoever has sent it to you.
        So, yes, I assume he has some time on hand to actually test it.

    • Re:SETI@home (Score:4, Informative)

      by Fweeky ( 41046 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2002 @03:41PM (#4020411) Homepage
      SETI will bring the CPU to the limit. If it's overclocked and/or badly cooled or otherwise unstable, you'll see that quickly.
      Better to use a dedicated util for this, like CPUBurn [ev1.net], which will exercise the CPU as much as possible to generate heat and verify everything's still working.

      Just because SETI/RC5/etc push CPU usage to 100%, doesn't mean they fully exercise all the various units on the CPU, or even that they'll notice if a bit flips here or there.
    • f you have the time, try running the SETI@home-client for 24h - and then install FreeBSD, make world, compile KDE3, mozilla and OpenOffice from ports.

      And if you don't quite feel like getting the computer after that, atleast you've done the owner a big favor (though they might not comprehend that right away, so prepare for a quick getaway)

  • Don't forget IBM's dft tool, which works with most modern hard disks, not only IBM models.

    plain unix method: dd if= bs= of=/dev/null is nice for a simple read test. Watch for console error messages. ;-)

    BTW, what I've found is that a lot of IDE drive errors result from bad cabling, not bad drives!

    The CPU stab test from jv16.org is also quite nice,sadly needs windows...

    *use a dozen or so known good disks ;-)

  • For old machines, use old software. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Deagol ( 323173 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2002 @03:15PM (#4020207) Homepage
    My favorite pre-web ftp site (after the original SIMTEL archive went down) was Garbo: ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi. It's web-enabled now (change "ftp" to "http" in the url), though most stuff is really dated now.

    Scrounge around the "sysinfo" and "sysutil" directories. There are a bunch of old utils that do what you're looking for.

    There was a german DOS utility. I can't remember the name, but I think it was simply "config" (or was it "pcconfig" or "pcinfo"?). Anyway, that utility could identify damned near anything in a PC (CPU, chipsets, memory, motherboard, etc.) and it ran some diagnostics. I tried to locate it again for this post, but I couldn't find it. If anyone knows where it went...

  • I cary a 3.5" mini cd full of diagnostics programs for winblows, because god knows you need them when dealing with windows and windows users. Here is a list of what's on the disc. First of all it's a basic MS-DOS bootable disk with all the functionality of a regular MS-DOS boot CD (fdisk, format, edit, etc) and a few utilities such as
    Fresh Diagnose [freshdevices.com]
    VNC server and viewer [att.com]
    NessusWX [nessus.org]
    Fresh Diagnose is an excellent benchmark/testing utility.
    VNC is for accessing remote desktops (Great for lazy people such as myself)
    NessusWX is a windows interface for Nessus security scanner. A must for checking default installations of any OS.
    All the extra utilites are freeware. MS-DOS is of course copyrighted.

    hth
  • To stress the memory, I use both stream (memory benchmark util) and memtest86 (as others have pointed out). For stressing disks, I use bonnie or bonnie++ (disk IO benchmark). To check for bad media, use the "badblocks" command -- it'll destroy any data, so be careful!

    I use the dnetc client (distributed.net) to tax the CPU.

  • here's an interesting one. let's say you (or someone you know) has just bought a brand new computer. or more or less new. or at any rate you know it works.

    but the blarsted thing starts all this junk up when the machine boots! everything fFrom media players, to monitor controllers, to printer and scanner watchdogs, almost certainly some schedule apps, and maybe a couple virusscanners! untold ram is just being gnashed away by a string of programs sitting in the systray!

    so, i always, when i go to look at a fFriend's new computer, take autoruns [sysinternals.com] fFrom www.sysinternals.com . conveniently shows every thing which is scheduled to boot fFrom anywhere in the registry or startup directory. lovely lovely app.

    that, and a nice task manager (there are many available.) i like A.T.M. [tiscali.it]

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