Boot CD & Free DOS
It was then I realised… that Windows XP boot CD is not enough to troubleshoot, when Bharath’s system failed to boot. It showed peculiar symptoms of failure. Sometimes it booted successfully but hanged after some time. Sometimes it will never boot.
First we suspected a virus attack.. then RAM problem.. then motherboard failure.. finally hard disk failure. We even suspected XP corruption. Finally we were unable to conclude where the problem is.
Instead of calling a system technician and spending some extra bucks, we decided to try our hands on. So to diagnose the system, we were searching for diagnostic utilities which will boot from a CD and run. Unfortunately i couldnt find any freeware that boots itself and diagnose the system.
Googling around, I found a freeware pack called “Ultimate Boot CD”, which is a CD ISO image, which can be burned into a CD. This will boot up the system, loads FreeDOS (still the DOS lives!) and a bunch of board, disk, memory utilties.
Looks like a promising tool.. I prepared the CD already. The testing is to be done tonight ! 