I can't really answer your question, but any memory tests that you'll
be able to run under vinux won't really give you the full picture due
to vinux using a more than ideal (In this situation) amount of ram.
E.G. Something like memtest which does have a linux port won't be able
to test all the ram that is in use by the os and other applications.
The ideal solution would be to boot into the memtest live cd, but you
won't be able to get speech due to its intentionally small footprint.
Perhaps if you had a monitor hooked up you could take a picture of the
output and OCR it? The test starts streight away if my memory serves
me correctly and errors are usually found with in the first 30 minutes
or so.
I'm not aware of any good harddrive testing tools that a: run from
linux and are accessible and b: output a diagnosis of the drive that
isn't 99% graphical - e.g. different colored blocks to represent the
condition of each sector. I know some hard drive people that like
mhdd, but this is a graphical boot disk. Although, having just said
this, I know of a dos based program called victoria; perhaps you could
convince this to run under windows?
Remember though that all drives these days will have an amount of
realicated sectors and this alone doesn't mean the drive is failing.
To be honest, I usually just guess at when a drive is failing. E.G.
very noisey, slow booting & general access times in relation to the
spec of the drive and file corruption.
Remember to hook the drive up directly to the motherboard; programs
will not be able to send the full set of ata commands to the drive if
it is connected via USB. Its worth noting that 2.5 and 3.5 sata drives
share the same connectors, so unless you want to mount the drive
inside the case as a long term project, no adaptor will need to be
purchased for these drives. Infact, the only time you would need to
buy something is if you needed to test a 2.5 IDE or a 1.8 drive.
Would be interested in hearing what other people have to say about this.
On 19/02/2011, David Mehler
Hello,
I'm wondering if vinux can pull this off and if so if anyone has a procedure? I've got several boxes, one for sure is parts only. I'd like to put various memory modules in it and various hard drives in it and test them. This machine will be hooked up to speakers so software speech is an option. If anyone has done this i'd appreciate knowing about it.
Thanks. Dave.
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