Suggestions for POST Diagnostic Cards?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday January 22, 2003 @12:21PM from the determining-your-computer's-health dept.

antis0c asks: "I have a number of PC's of mine, and family that have stopped working, or caused other odd unknown failures such as 4 different harddrives, different brands, all becoming physically damaged in the same computer. General fixing is as easy as removing some hardware until the problem goes away, then putting it back until it comes back, thus narrowing down to the single problem hardware. However more tricky problems require a POST Card. I've never purchased one before and I think I could get more use out of older hardware if I did, and I was wondering if the Slashdot community had any suggestions and comments on the various brands out there such as POSTmortem, MSD PostCodeMaster, and PC Engines. Thanks."

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Any with memory? by AxelTorvalds · 2003-01-24 03:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

I would love a $65 3v and 5v compatible POST with like 2K of memory on it. Anyone seen something like that?
You can buy an HP logic analyzer on EBay and program them to do PCI decodes and record POSTs. The deep throats and the new wizbang color models are still very expensive but you can get one that will work for well under a thousand.
I debugged the Linux kernel boot process on an embedded box with POSTs and an HP logic analzyer. One you get some hardware geek to set it up for you it's a slick way to work on that kind of stuff.