Testing with no operating system installed |

Many BurnInTest users can benefit from testing PC hardware when there is no Operating System installed, or the Operating System is inoperable. This can be useful for testing PC hardware:

1. | In a production line environment,

2. | That is to be shipped with Linux,

3. | In a known virus free environment and

4. | To try to determine the cause of corruption of an Operating System.

The most common technique is to use a Windows Pre-install environment. BurnInTest has been tested with 2 such environments, allowing a bootable CD, DVD or USB flash drive with BurnInTest to be used to test a system without an installed operating system.

As the pre-install environments do not include all of the tools and drivers that a standard Windows system would, there are some limitations in testing a system with BurnInTest using a Pre-install environment. These are outlined below.

Please note that you can run BurnInTest from a CD, DVD or USB drive without a Pre-install environment if your target test system has an operating system installed. A pre-install environment is only needed if the system to be tested does not have an operable Windows operating system installed. Please see "Installing BurnInTest to a USB drive or optical drive".

Microsoft WinPE support

Currently, the following BurnInTest tests are supported:

• | CPU;

• | Optical disk (read tests);

• | RAM;

• | Disk (disk volumes only);

• | Network (Standard);

• | Plugin (BurnInTest plugins).

Currently, the following tests under are not supported:

• | Parallel Port ;

• | Serial port;

• | Video Playback;

• | Sound;

• | 2D;

• | 3D;

• | USB (using the Passmark USB plugs);

• | Printer;

• | Tape.

Please note that we have intentionally not restricted any of the BurnInTest tests in software, as some users may be able to use these tests with additional environment configuration.

Some system information normally displayed by BurnInTest will not be available under WinPE, this includes (but may not be limited to) the Graphics card, HDD model and USB controller/device information.

Note that in our testing the 32-bit version of BurnInTest will not run in a 64-bit WinPE environment – use the 64-bit version of BurnInTest in this scenario.

BartPE support

Currently, the following BurnInTest tests are supported:

• | CPU;

• | Optical disk (read tests);

• | RAM;

• | Disk (For testing Hard disks, other disk types, USB ports using USB drives, Firewire ports using Firewire drives);

• | Network (Standard);

• | Parallel Port ;

• | Serial port;

• | Video Playback;

• | Plugin (BurnInTest plugins, not BartPE plugins).

Currently, the following tests under are not supported:

• | Sound;

• | 2D;

• | 3D;

• | USB (using the Passmark USB plugs);

• | Printer;

• | Tape.

Please note that we have intentionally not restricted any of the BurnInTest tests in software, as some users may be able to use these tests with additional environment configuration.

The same limitations apply to running BurnInTest from a CD as under a ‘normal’ installation of Windows, for example, you will not be able to save the configuration settings to the CD and Accumulated log file results will not be available. It is recommended that you test with a USB drive and save/load the configuration file to/from this, as well as saving any log files to the USB drive.

For more information about building WinPE or BartPE bootable media with BurnInTest please see our documents online at http://passmark.com/download/bit_download.htm