PC Diagnostics/Troubleshooting Software Toolkit

I have limited experience with troubleshooting PC's. Please share with us the software's that you use in the diagnosing/troubleshooting/repair/data recovery, etc. of PC's.

Here is a small list that I have started:

1. Hard Drive/Partition Imaging to allow for backing up of all files on a system which is not bootable, allowing the System Partition to be wiped/formatted and the OS re-installed. My preference would be to use Image for Linux.

2. Hard Drive Diagnostics
a. Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test (Works on all manufacturer's hard drives)
b. Seagate's SeaTools (Works only on Seagate & Maxtor hard drives)
c. Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics (Works only on WD HD's.)
d. Samsung's Hutil (Works only on Samsung Hard Drives)

3. Puppy Linux Bootable CD (Would be used primarily for copying individual files from a non-bootable PC.)

4. Hard Drive Partition Management - I own a BING license so I would probably use only BING. Some other possibilities are: GParted (Puppy Linux) or Partition Wizard's bootable CD.

5. Disk Wiping before formatting and OS Re-Install - DBAN or Terabyte's CopyWipe.

Thanks in Advance.

 

SiSoftware's Sandra is a great suite of tools to use for various things such as benchmarking, info, and troubleshooting, plus their is a free version but i do not know the differences.

 

There are quite a few out there already, BartPE, UBCD, Sirens, etc.

I've not relied on them heavily, as over the years of working on computers, I've found hardware diag tools to not be very accurate...if a drive is having problems, they're so cheap it's simply easier to replace. And I've seen memory diag tools report memory is fine, even though the computer continues to have problems, replacing the memory with proper RAM that's specifically tested/approved compatible with the mobo is the cheap and easy fix.

 

UBCD4Win with a few additional plugins pretty much covers all my diagnostic/repair requirements.

 

Which additional plugins would you recommend?

Thanks.

 

I use UBCD4WIN, and Bart PE a lot. I also use an O&O Diskimage v.3.5 Pro boot disk because with it I can do a system restore from the disk if the computer won't boot.

Alan