Btw I’m going to fork this thread reply into its own faq.
I’ll be back with instructions and links in a short while
Working on this now
You require for testing:
A working atx power supply
Possibly a working at power supply
A floppy drive, or usb to floppy emulator, and cable for it
A floppy disc (or 4mb-16mb usb stick for an emulator)
memtest official siteYou’ll want the precompiled image for floppy.
If that passes you’ve got a semi-reliable motherboards and good ram.
(Oh, there’s two bootable cd forks of memtest, ramtest64 and ramtest128 for 64bit and custom CPUs, respectively that can test MUCH more ram at a time for modern system testing)
On to the next step:
This is where things get interesting, and this is far beyond a one time memory test. But if you do this often enough...
For anything beyond dos and testing components individually using included dos tools and or basic, you need a floppy disk emulator or a hard disk
The fastest and lightest Linux distros that can run WIne (there’s a reason see below) and load a desktop take over 9mb.
Both of these can run from a sub 64mb usb stick on the emulator if set to super disk or Zip disk. (Or tape drive if you don’t mind sitting around forever since the emulator also emulates the slow read rate).
tiny coreand damn small.
Boot, click live test, wait for it to load.
Type crtl+right shift+g
Type wine.
Click ok
Type admin for the password
Wait for install
Double click on web and head over to
https://www.ccleaner.com/speccyAnd download speccy. You can double click and load this via wine now. Which will give you fairly straight forward instructions to install and run it.
Speccy will tell you every last detail of WHAT is installed and the model and serial numbers. Makes resale easier. You can use the menu bar on the desktop to close out Linux and even save the image in its current state so you have a permanent USB key.
a sample emulator searchYou’ll want one than can emulate Zip drives and/or tape systems.
Also while most will have an x86 driver in the rom or on the web site do your work first before buying and be sure the driver is ‘bare metal’ or dos, as that allowes you to boot an os off it. Otherwise the unit won’t work till the os is loaded and you have a problem because the os is on a drive in the unit etc.
Be warned some images on the dos boot disk site are
NSFW!!!!!!
It’s not porn but some underwear advertising could send the boss into a squirmy fit.
Finally dos boot disks.Last if you want to buy an old copy of dos legally you can do so at emsps dot com.
But I’ve never used them and don’t know what the pricing is.