PCCheck

Sticking the Boot to UEFI
A recent analysis of case reports revealed some common issues encountered by users when booting Pc-Check from a USB thumb drive.

Booting Pc-Check from a thumb drive is a great option. One of the “key” benefits of this method is that you can save your test results on the USB thumb drive for easy uploading into your archives.

When creating Pc-Check USB media, there are a few pointers to remember…


 * Always use the command line option /HI when booting from USB.


 * Issues can be encountered when testing hard drives and running the System Stress Test due to the USB key appearing as a hard drive. If you are running a test script that includes hard drive testing, it may be unnecessarily carried out against the USB key.


 * This is because when booting a system from a USB flash device (or similar), the BIOS will create an emulation of a hard disk and assign it LUN 80h to support the boot. This device will then ordinarily appear in reports and diagnostics as if a real device, commonly failing in items such as the System Stress Test.

To fix this, use the command line option /HI. This command line option ignores a hard disk on BIOS LUN 80h and suppresses the emulated drive.

Working around low memory issues when booting Pc-Check from USB.

In a few cases, users have encountered low memory issues with attempting to boot Pc-Check. Pc-Check executes inside the 640k of Conventional Memory that should be free to the system at POST. Unfortunately bits of this can be stolen by bad BIOS implementations. If you are booting from USB, you can try deleting either the PcCheck.PTF or the PCIINF.DAT file to force Pc-Check.exe to use a few less resources. Alternately there may be opportunities to free up memory by disabling options in the BIOS such as PXE and RAID.

Use legacy USB support.

In some cases, issues encountered when attempting to boot Pc-Check via USB key can be overcome by enabling legacy USB support in the BIOS settings.


 * Avoid USB testing if you intend to save results to USB.


 * Functional USB testing can cause the USB key to become unavailable for writing results in the current Pc-Check session. If you are writing your results to a USB thumb drive then USB Functional testing is not advised.

Recovering your USB drive space.


 * To recover the Non Allocated space on the USB, open eTestManager and choose Create USB Media, Select the Clean and Format Only option. This will reset the MBR on the device. It can then be re-formatted from Windows Explorer.