Bootable Usb System Diagnostics

[Ma Layssard]

Run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. More and more PCs are shipped without floppy drives these days, and it is such a royal pain when you need to run diagnostic tools on them.

Free yourself from the slow loading speed of the floppy drive. Even if you do have a floppy drive, it is still much much faster to run your diagnostic tools from the CDROM drive, rather than wait for the tool to load from the floppy drive.

Consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Wouldn't you like to avoid digging into the dusty box to look for the right floppy disk, but simply run them all from a single CD? Then the Ultimate Boot CD is for you!

Run Ultimate Boot CD from your USB memory stick. A script on the CD prepares your USB memory stick so that it can be used on newer machines that supports booting from USB devices. You can access the same tools as you would from the CD version.

New! The Linux-based distro Parted Magic is now included with UBCD V5.0. This should be the method of choice when you need to resize/rescue partitions, access NTFS filesystems or work with USB storage devices.

I then connected an external monitor - using Fn-F8 gives me video output, but the only thing that happens is that it boots to a small screen called "Choose an Option". The three options are Test Memory, Test System, and Exit.

Well - I decided to get this one down off the shelf (the charity couldn't afford the cost of new software, so it has just sat around for a while...), dust it off, and see if a fresh look could come up with anything.

I reviewed all the posts above, and re-tried everything I tried 18 months ago, with no improvement. When connected to another machine, i could read the drive, virus check it, access the files, etc, but no joy with anything else.

I then considered the issue of the constant booting straight into the diagnostics, and given that the diagnostics are in a different partition to the OS, I went into Disk Management to check which partition was the active one. it turned out that the partition with the diagnostics was the active partition, while the partition with the OS was not.

Check to see if the Diagnostics and the OS are in seperate partitions - in my case, they were, and the partition with the diagnotics was set as the active partition. Resetting the partition with the OS as the active partition solved the issue.

Some further info - I ran the PSA diagnostics which came up with the error message "No Diagnostic Utility Partition identified", which seems odd, as the it keeps booting to the diagnostic partition...

It sounds like the hard drive may have been partitioned. Since the basic test passed the drive may be alright. After the basic tests run the system will try to load extended diagnostics, if the drive has been formated, extended diagnostics may be erased and the system will give the "No Diagnostic Utility Partition identified" message.

Run a full diagnostic on the drive - all manufacturers except Toshiba have a downloadable diagnostic you can run. If the drive passes, you'll need to do a clean install of Windows. If it fails, of course, replace it.

Depending on your version of OS (e.g. Windows Vista - go to Start, then Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Storage, and finally, Disk Management) go to Disk Management. This will list your disks/partitions. Right-click on the partition that has your OS and, if not already set, select Mark Partition As Active. Use the same process to change the partition with the diagnostics from active.

There are occasions where you must create a bootable USB Flash Drive. Scenarios that require a USB drive include a BIOS update outside the operating system, when no operating system is installed, or when the computer cannot boot to the operating system. Difficulty getting the BIOS updates to work within the Operating System, due to permissions, restrictions, anti-virus, or compatibility with the update schedule.

There can be many reasons that a virtual machine enters a non-bootable state. To address issues with your virtual machines created using Resource Manager deployment model, you can use the following debugging features: Console Output and Screenshot support for Azure virtual machines.

For Linux virtual machines, you can view the output of your console log from the Portal. For both Windows and Linux virtual machines, Azure enables you to see a screenshot of the VM from the hypervisor. Both features are supported for Azure virtual machines in all regions. Note, screenshots and output can take up to 10 minutes to appear in your storage account.

On the Management tab, in Monitoring section, make sure that Boot diagnostics is turned on. The default setting is to have boot diagnostics enabled using a managed storage account.

The Boot diagnostics feature does not support premium storage account or Zone Redundant Storage Account Types. If you use the premium storage account for Boot diagnostics, you might receive the StorageAccountTypeNotSupported error when you start the VM.

If you are deploying from an Azure Resource Manager template, navigate to your virtual machine resource and append the diagnostics profile section. Set the API version header to "2015-06-15" or later. The latest version is "2018-10-01".

If you notice the Boot Diagnostics screenshot for your Azure VM is stale in the Azure portal, first make sure the virtual display timeout is disabled in the guest operating system. For example, you may see the time shown on the logon screen is stale for a Windows VM.

For Windows VMs, the Azure provisioning agent is different than the VM agent. It runs the above command during provisioning for VMs created from a generalized image. You can see this event if you search for powercfg in C:\Windows\Panther\WaSetup.xml, which is the provisioning agent log. But since the provisioning agent does not need to run for VMs created from a specialized VHD, that is a scenario where you would need to run the powercfg command manually to disable the virtual display timeout. Also, it is possible to have a particularly old Azure VM created from generalized image that may not have it set because it was created before the provisioning agent was updated to disable the virtual display timeout.

Most newer computers have options at startup to test the hardware. This feature can range from a few memory tests to coverage of all the hardware components. Obviously this type of test requires a system that boots to those diagnostics. Most of the time you can boot into those, but not always.

First I will diagonize the problem with the help of tool, then give a quotation for reparing charges and after getting approval from customer; I proceed to repairing task. I believe that this is the standard process of doing job.

So our company went out and spent 30k on a new DL360 G10. I was looking forward to getting it into our environment but after hours of frustration I'm about to send this thing back.

HP has apparently modified the bios so much that there are no more hardware diagnostics to run to burn it in, and the bios settings to get it to boot to a usb stick don't work.

I've disabled, enabled, uefi, all security options for booting to a usb stick. The deployement software built into the bios won't accept a microsoft iso file to install the OS. It just says verifying, then does nothing and won't let me select the iso file on the usb stick.

Even when I can get it to boot to the usb stick, for some reason I don't have any mouse or keyboard options to use. I've tried usb mouse and keyboard, and even the one on the kvm...no luck nothing works.

I've attempted to connect to the ilo interface to get thru it, no luck.

I've worked with HP products for years and this one is one of the most frustrating ones I've ever come across.

I've tried searching blogs and everything else but apparently there's nothing out there yet.

When I try using HP's site and search specifically for the model and the results I get are for g9's and earlier, which doesn't apply.

Completely frustrated with this new model!!!

I can't believe on such a new server I would have to do updates to it already and that the software that came on it wouldn't work as it should. But I am downloading it.

Since HP changed the bios, the one time boot option doesn't work as it has in previous version. It reboots the server and then skips the one time option selected.

I've set up countless numbers of HP servers, but this one takes the cake for how much more complex it is just to get it to boot and install an OS.

I did test the USB stick on another server and it booted to it fine and allowed me to use the mouse and keyboard just fine. However this G10 won't.

I'll do the SP update and see how that goes, but still very disappointed in how, right out of the box, difficult this new server is to setup and configure not to mention how poorly the HP support site has become when I can't even find solutions or relevant search results to my query.

If the system is skiping the device you have selected for one time boot, it is generally because it doesn't recognise the device. Gen9 and Gen10 server are UEFI based systems. Is your boot device proper for booting UEFI, or is it MBR based for booting a BIOS type system?

Well I tried the SPP update, crashed part of the way thru and now I have a black screen with Stack error messages all over it, RIP error message. Basically it's crashing now when trying to boot. I had even tried to reset everything to factory defaults and that's when the crashing started.

I'm familiar with how to build a boot image and have done so many times over th 30 years I've been working on servers. Even our purchase last year of the G9 series went fine, doing the same process I've always done. But this new G10 quite frankly sucks. It appears they spent too much time trying to pretty up the BIOS guis, yes there is more than one depending on which option you select.

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