I work at a computer recycling center, at it we test machines that are core 2 duo and newer to make sure they work. It’s annoying to every time have to boot to thumb drive, select 64 bit, open up what says the system info, and then run a benchmark. So I was wondering if it is possible to automate it
My hopes are as followed
-Be able to boot to network and have it automatically have the system specs shown and have it so the test can be ran. Works fine if it’s through thumb drives instead of network
If I could have thumb drives that are basically a modded linux thumbdrive that auto runs neofetch with the program we currently use for hardware testing, that’d be amazing (tests RAM and CPU), or just anything similar to that. I’m trying to do some looking around but not finding much information on this
Also, we don’t install any OS’s to the machines, the HDD’s are wiped or crushed, and not in the machine. Hence why thumb drive or network boot. Also we use system stability tester, if something newer and does the same thing I won’t be upset, not too anal about the exact programs
Pretty sure you need to access it via a port that has lower level access. USB I think is pretty high level so perhaps a serial port? You could have a network of machines and then plug the machine your testing into one of these machines that could send a HTTPS request to the central machine for the UI.
The first step I think would be to figure out how to plug one machine into another without booting the OS on the machine being tested and see what you can access via serial port and research that part.
That’s more on the individual computer’s side. PXE boot is not universal, and only works with eithernet, and iPXE is also not super common.
You could either create a custom live linux ISO(can be put on USB, network or DVD boot), or install Linux to the USB drive.
I do not have any experience with creating a custom live iso, so no specific tool recommendations there.
For installing Linux that is actually installing the OS on the stick, not just flashing a live ISO to it. Then add some programs to autostart, there are a bunch of options on how to autostart stuff, and partially depends on the distro and desktop environment. You will have to make sure the initramfs has all the modules so as to boot on every computer possible. Also, do whatever possible to minimize writes to the USB stick, otherwise it will die mighty quick.