Forum OpenACS Q&A: Knoppix for computer burn-in testing?

What's the best and easiest tool to use for burning-in a new computer, to catch any and all hardware problems before actually putting it into use?

There are many stand-alone programs useful for that sort of thing, like Memtest86, CPUburn, Bonnie++, and just plain old repeatedly compiling the Linux kernel. But, is there a boot-able Live CD distribution, like Knoppix, that includes all those tools in an easy to use format? I couldn't really tell by Googling, but I know we have at least one or two Knoppix experts here...

Over the last few years when assembling my own machine or three (particularly the cheaper ones), I've been bitten several times by flaky hardware (so far: crappy power supplies, flaky older RAID cards). Swapping out the parts was quick, but the time I wasted manually figuring out what was wrong was simply absurd.

And now, I've seen a fancy new Mobile Athlon 64 based laptop, an Acer Ferrari 3200 (not mine), running Windows XP, which when left sitting idle overnight, will sometimes Blue Screen with a machine_check_exception error. My guess is that Acer screwed up their Windows XP configuration somehow, but it would be really nice to just be able to stick in some sort of Knoppix CD in order to independently verify that the hardware looks ok.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
You might want to try sysresccd (http://www.sysresccd.org/) as knoppix by default does not contain e.g. memtest, though with the cheat codes you can run a memtest anyway :).
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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Hm, that Linux SystemRescueCd does look useful for recovery, but it doesn't seem to contain tools intended for burning in a new system.

I figure someone must have done this already, so I'd really rather not get into building my own custom version of one of these bootable CD distributions.

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Posted by Jeff Lu on
you can try downloading mprime or prime95. http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm
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Posted by Jeff Lu on
You can also try sisoft sandra, it has a burn in test I think. You must run that under windows.