System diagnostic sofware?

[Peyton]

I'd appreciate some current recommendations for system test and diagnostic software. The last message on diagnostic software was in Jan 05, so I thought I'd see if current thinking was about the same. Recommended then were MemTest86, Prime95 and Tufftest.

I have a Tyan Tiger i7505 MB, two 3 GHz Xeon processors, a gig of RAM, a 120 GB WD harddrive as the prime, and an 80 GB removable HD. Last weekend, the machine started locking up during a DVD rendering routine. Reboots yielded occasional messages of "Operating system not found." The HD has been running fine in another machine since then, and has been beat up by two benchmarking programs and is doing well with a big video render, lots of page-file writes. Maybe it's not the drive, so I need a good way to check the rest of the system.

 

[uber_g]

prime95, memtest and 3mark r still great system tests


i would still use them

also try Super Pi

 

[choirbass]

well... you didnt mention anything about having OCd at all, but if you did, restoring the clocks back to normal would be good

if you have any blue screens, check for the 0x00 error on microsofts knowledge base

remove ANY software/drivers and any additional hardware youve installed since shortly before the errors started happening... also disconnect the 80GB

scan your system completely for any malware/spyware/adware/virus'

perform a diskcheck on all hdds

system restore is also a possibility if you havent tried it yet

as far as your WD 120GB, check to see if WD has any diagnostic utilities on their site

but... it does kinda sound like a hdd error, because your OS isnt able to be found upon reboot... OCing also causes similar errors

there are other potential problems... but, nothing really indicating (to me), that theyre the cause; psu, gpu, etc.