Diagnostic Tools for Testing 2nd Hand Machines?

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."

Comments

Bootable Linux

[pythorlh]

Maybe one of href=http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/04/0 00205&mode=nested&tid=106

Well now.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

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,

memtest86

[josepha48]

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.

Re:memtest86

[josepha48]

dmesg has this kind of output. Also on a LInux distro you can look at the /proc filesystem. /proc/pci tells all sorts of info about the PCI bus and what is attached. It tells the Bus, device, function, USB stuff, Ethernet stuff, etc. All devices on pci. Alternatively you could use lspci as well. Below is the output of lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX Host bridge (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX AGP bridge (rev 03)
00:04.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
00:04.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:04.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
00:04.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 02)
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Accton Technology Corporation SMC2-1211TX (rev 10)

If the CPU was bad the system would probably not boot. I have not heard of to many intel CPUs being bad, but I'm sure a

Your brain - then some very basic tools

[ivan256]

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.

SETI@home

[rainer_d]

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

Re:SETI@home

[Fweeky]

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, 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.

Re:Well....

[Nynaeve]

Hard drive testing programs:
IBM -- Drive Fitness Test
Maxtor -- Powermax
Western Digital -- Data Lifeguard Tools Utilities: DLGDIAG
Seagate -- SeaTools
Fujitsu -- Diagnostic Tool
NOTE: Some of these tools may work with all drives, but this (free) collection should cover quite a few drives.

For old machines, use old software.

[Deagol]

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...

Re:For old machines, use old software.

[Deagol]

Sorry for the self-reply! The util was called PC-CONFIG, and it's at http://www.holin.com. Great package. It's shareware, though. The prices are reasonable, however.