PC Repair Kit - Troubleshooting Hardware

You're working on a project on your PC and actually making progress for once.  You're about to finish, and just before you save the data.... the system crashes!  All you data is lost, and now your only motivation is to take a stick of dynamite to the PC.

Unfortunately PC's break down and crashes happen.  Before taking the PC to a repair shop and spending 80/hr having someone you don't know fix it, why not diagnose the problem your self and find out what's wrong, and see if it's something that you can fix.  This is a two part post on how to troubleshoot and diagnose problems with the PC.  These first few posts will cover hardware issues and how to diagnose them. 

Memory Failure

Diagnosis:

Random Access Memory or RAM, is memory that is used by programs to run.  The more memory a PC has, the more memory the programs can use for their operations.  Whenever RAM fails, the information that is written by the program is different that the information that is written onto the memory module.  For a simple example, if the program writes "Hello", a bad sector of RAM could write it as "elHlo".  This causes the program to pull corrupt data from the memory, and causes crashes of the program. 

Typical signs of memory are therefore program and/or system crashes.  In windows, this is typically followed by the infamous "Blue Screen of Death".  This will be especially prevalent during high memory usage programs such as:

• Video Games
• Installations
• Photo/Video Editing

Another sign of memory failure can be a failure to boot.  This can be followed by a continuous beep from the system, which is an indication that the BIOS has detected a massive memory failure. (reference site)

Troubleshooting/Repair:

Whenever you suspect there is a memory failure, the first thing you should do is re-seat the memory modules. Remove the case from the PC, and locate the memory modules.  Remove them from the motherboard.  At this time, I typically clean the modules with a Q-Tip dipped in rubbing alcohol.  The most important part of the memory modules are the golden tips on the edge.  This is where the motherboard access's the memory, and if it's not clean then there can be problems with reading/writing to the memory.  

Next, make sure that the memory seats (the sockets where the memory is installed onto the motherboard) are clean and free of dust as well.  Use canned air to clean out the sockets of any dust.  Re-seat the memory sockets and boot up the PC.  If originally you were having issues booting up the PC, try seating only one module at a time.  This is a quick way to determine if one of the memory modules is the bad modules or if one of the motherboard memory seats are bad as well.  

After you have determined that the memory is clean and free of dust, the next thing to do is use Memtest86+. Memtest86+ will write data to the memory and the instantly read back that data and compare the two data strings.  If they match, then there aren't any problems with that section of memory.  If they don't then there's a problem with writing to the memory.  

Screen Shot of Memtest86+

Memtest86+ is a bootable program which means that you have to boot to the program.  I suggest using a USB flash drive to accomplish this.  I have posted a How To here on how to set this up.  

Another way to have access to Memtest86+ is to use a ubuntu live cd or use Hiren's Boot CD.  Most other bootable CD recovery packages have Memtest installed on them.  

Screen Shot of Failing Memory (reference)

Once you've booted up into Memtest86+ just let it run and do it's work.  There's really no involvement other than waiting for Memtest to find errors.   If there are errors that Memtest detects, it will display them on the bottom half of the screen highlighted in red. It's good practice to run Memtest for at least 7 to 8 passes.  Since each pass can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, it's a good idea to run the testing overnight.  If errors appears right away, this is a big sign that the memory is bad or dirty, but can also be a sign of the actual socket failure, meaning motherboard failure. 

The Bootable USB Flash Drive PC Repair Kit

Thanks to SuperUser, I have won a 32gb USB Flash Drive.  The one that they sent me was the Patriot Xporter XT Boost 32GB.

Since I do a lot of PC repair on the side, I decided to make this flash drive, my PC repair kit.  So this is the first post of the How Do I Tech blog.  After doing some research, and asking my good friends over at SuperUser I have come up with a good plan of how to tackle this.

Picking out the drive:

First off, the selection of the Flash Drive is essential.  You need to look at a flash drive that will be able to handle the speed of booting up to an Operating System.  That means that USB 2.0 is pretty much a must.  Even though some of the PC's you might be repairing don't support USB 2.0, it'll make all the difference on the ones that do.  The next thing to look at is the space of the drive.  This is determined with what you decide on doing with the drive.  I wanted to make sure that I had an option to be able to boot up to either a Linux option, or a Windows recovery option, that means that I need at least a 4 gb stick (I actually did do this with a 4 gb Lexar flash drive, and had some room to spare).  I suggest using at least that much space, but if you can afford it, then get a bigger drive.

Preparation and Installation:

(Note that my screen shot says that it's already found the
software, that's becuase I did this before, and it saved the
program for me.)

Once you've picked out your drive, and bought it, it's time to prep the drive.  Go to PenDriveLinux and download their software for the multi boot USB drive.  It's a small file (less than a Mb) so it won't take long to download.  

Open the software, and click the yes to the agreement.  The next screen will prompt you to select the drive you wish to use (be sure that you select the correct one, otherwise you'll delete the content of the wrong drive).  Since this is the first time using the program to prep the drive, we want to format the drive, so go ahead and select the formatting option.  

Next select the program that you want to install onto the drive.  Then click the Download the ISO option.  I let the program automatically download the ISO's of the programs/OS that I wanted to use, with the exception of Ubuntu desktop 10.04, Ubuntu Rescue Remix 10.04 and Hiren's Boot CD which I downloaded and then pointed PenDriveLinux to the correct file location.  Then click next and let it do it's thing.  It will ask you to remove the drive and reinsert it.  That's because it's formatting the drive.  When it's done, it should look like this:

Click the next button, and then you'll be prompted if you want to add more ISO/DISTROS.  Click yes, and then it brings you back to the first screen again.  select the drive again,  but make sure the format option in UNSELECTED. Then select the program/OS that you want to use, and then next.  You'll notice that the program/OS that you just installed is no longer there.  This is to prevent duplicates.  Do this for all the programs/OS's that you want to install.  Once you're done, just click no to the prompting of adding ISO's, and you're set!  You now have a Bootable USB Flash Drive PC Repair Kit!

Here's what I added to my PC Repair Kit:

1. Memtest 86+
2. Ultimate Boot CD v5.02
3. Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Linux)
4. Hiren's Boot CD
5. gparted
6. Clonezilla
7. Offline NT Password & Registry Editor
8. Ubuntu Rescue Remix 10.04 (Recovery Tools)
9. OphCrack XP 2.3.1 (XP Password Cracker)

All-in all it took up 2.5 GB.  I also added a portable version of GetDataBack that I just transferred over to the drive.

Usage:

In order to boot up to the USB flash drive, you have to enable the USB drive to boot up from the BIOS.  If you're PC's BIOS doesn't support booting up from a USB, then you can use a linux boot cd and GRUB to then boot to the USB drive.  Here's the link for that. (Thanks to hanleyp over at SuperUser for that find).  Once you boot up from the drive, you'll get a menu looking like this:

From here, you simply select the program or OS that you wan to boot from, and start using it!  I'll post later with more details on how to use the programs that come with/are downloaded onto the PC Repair kit.