Dave,

I'm with the UBD for Windows camp. You download the installer, have your 
windows install disk handy as it will need files off of it (licensing 
issues) and the installer will build an ISO image file you can burn to CD.

The CD will have many utilities including some to clone discs, password 
recovery and many more. The diagnostics section is very comprehensive 
and I think you will be very happy with it.

Hope this helps!

Dave Powell, MMfab wrote:
> Anybody have any experience / recommendations?   I'm looking for hardware
> tests that can be run from a bootable CD, completely bypassing Windows.  I've
> done some searches and found a few products that claim to be perfect in every
> way, but they don't give enough specifics to tell me how close they are to
> what I want.
>
> My ideal diagnostics would be much like the CD Dell ships with their Optiplex
> machines, but I want to buy other brands which sadly come with lame
> diagnostics, or none at all.  And the Dell CDs don't like to run on other
> brands.  Dell's CD offers nice choices full system tests or a menu of
> individual tests, choice of quick or long flavors of most tests, etc, etc.
>
> PS:  the bit about bypassing Windows is a big deal for me.  Just recently
> Windows on a month-old Dell decided to boot into BSOD with a pretty useless
> error message, but the Dell bootable CD ran just fine and reported memory &
> cache errors and it was easy to get Dell to replace the parts.  Without that
> CD I might have gone on a Windows reinstall wild goose chase.  Either that or
> I'd still be on the phone with Dell support.
>
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>
>   

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