Well, that sounded much more dramatic than it should have.

Ok, it would appear that I'm going to end up creating a small business selling computers with a friend of mine. I'm obviously gonna look for as low-cost a start as physically possible.

So, something that will be very useful to me is a USB stick with various basic tools on - especially ones that can run from boot.

I need to make a collection of the following, or as close to it as I can.

1. Hard Drive Utility capable of formatting, partitioning and anything else useful that will work on most HDD's.
2. RAM testing program
3. Other utilities that will help in diagnosing problems in boot etc etc.

I'd like to have these all on one USB, but if not multiple USB drives is no problem

I'm open to all suggestions and information, links to good sites that will give me said information.

I'm gonna edit the following section to keep up to date with findings:

HDD UTILITIES
Seagate Seatools DOS Clicky

I've done some google searching, and can find various HDD utilities for various brands of HDD, but this is no good to me if I'm going to possible be dealing with unknown HDD types.

If all you need to do is format and partition drives and not do low-level hard drive diagnostics, you don't really need any special tools. I'm guessing you're doing Windows, so just get a dos boot image with format and fdisk. If you're looking at supporting Linux as well, you'd be better off using some open-source alternative, since those typically will support the Windows file system formats (NTFS and FAT32) as well as the Linux ones like ext3. There are plenty of live Linux distributions that are chock full of diagnostic utilities... these are usually bootable CDs or DVDs.

Bootable USB is cool, but beware that it's a "relatively" recent invention. If you're going to be supporting older computers, you may or may not be able to boot from a USB drive. Booting from optical media, however, is much more common. So you may actually be better served by going with a bootable CD/DVD if you're looking at supporting older hardware.

So, for actual utilities assuming Windows:

format and fdisk on a DOS bootable CD is my recommendation. Maybe chkdsk or something to go along with that. This is for hard drives.
Memtest86 for memory testing. Here's a project for a more modern version: http://www.memtest.org/#downiso.

Once actually in Windows, there are a few utilities I use heavily:
ProcessExplorer - task manager replacement - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96653.aspx
DebugView - monitor application debug traces - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96647.aspx
Process Monitor - view registry and file access - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96645.aspx
Packetyzer - for network packet analysis - http://sourceforge.net/projects/packetyzer/

Windows also comes with a few utilities that are indispensable
Event Viewer - the most important and overlooked tool ever.
chkdsk/defrag
performance monitor

That's about it. Most of the downloaded Windows utilities are very specialized... you really need to know what you're doing to make good use of them. *shrug* I don't do a lot of work doing memory tests or hard drive checking in my job. I do, however, do a lot of work on network, operating system, and application issues. The above + google is pretty much all I use to figure those out.

Wow, that's a pretty comprehensive list! I'll start research in to all of these

And yeah, USBoot (at least, that's what I'm calling it) is relatively new, but most of the stuff I will be selling will be new kit. I will be servicing these machines for up to 1 year after the sale

Thank you man.

Good luck. I'm not sure how much help the stuff I posted will be for what sounds mostly like PC tech support, but I hope they're of some use. Let me know if you want me to build you any custom utilities. Obviously this won't be free, but I'm interested what kind of needs you may run into.