Hi, the thing is that my brother's PC running Windows 7 has pretty much gone FUBAR and he gets bluescreens all the time now. He is not much of a tech geek and needs my help with diagnosing the problem, at the same time he lives far away and I can't just take a look at his PC to get an educated guess what is wrong with his machine. His bet is on the HDD but I myself once wrongly assumed that the problem was caused by a broken HDD but an overheating graphics card turned out to be a problem - I think he might be right this time but I'm not sure enough to tell him to get a new HDD.

Anyway, as far as I know there are some portable Linux distributions for diagnosing hardware problems which I guess would be his best bet to find out what's wrong with his PC. However, I've never used one of those myself and don't even know where to start. Google isn't that helpful, I've found some top 5 lists and whatnot but they didn't sound that convincing or I wasn't sure if the recommended stuff is actually what we're looking for.

I'm sure quite a few GOGers have a lot of experience with this stuff so I'm asking you guys. I'd be very grateful if you could recommend me something free that would help us diagnosing hardware problems on a PC where the only installed OS doesn't quite work anymore.

Thank you.

Not a distro but all hard disk manufacturers make a utility program for testing and changing settings in the firmware of their hard disks. You must use the correct one though. Those programs are free to download from their websites.

I know you said free, but I'll say this anyway:

I use Parted Magic (https://partedmagic.com/), for home and at work. It has a lot of features to list, a few of my popular ones: Windows password removal, Data recovery and backups, Network testing, HDD cloning, removal of corrupted files preventing Windows from booting.

While this is not free, it's only 11$ / 10€, it's compatible with almost any hardware combination be it laptop or desktop, it also comes pre configured out of the box with many workarounds.

Any idea on what the error on the blue screen is?

There's a list here which is probably foreign to many folks but if we knew more, we may be able to help:

https://www.lifewire.com/blue-screen-error-codes-4065576

Wrong year guys. :P

Hmmm... post#3 is missing, so I asssume this was another necro by the new nazi alt.

Fine, then I'm NOT gonna ask for help with defusing this b

Did you figure it out?

Stuff like that seems to be more memory than anything else but that's just the ones I see.

You mean stuff like bombs? Because it seems like there won't be a need for any further help that one...

Could swear I found this thread at like page 1-2, I didn't even look at the last post date.

"oopsie-necro"

You did nothing wrong. ;) It was necroed by a troll, their post was deleted, but topic was not sent back to its old place.

Aha, that explains it, I remember downvoting someone twice today for trolling posts. Been a long day, forgot one of the comments was in this thread.


@ F4LL0UT: Despite being 1 year late, my suggestion stands :-)