Today discovered Parted Magic in UBCD50B12 -- this is not just a partitioning tool, but a whole nifty mini-Linux LiveCD hidden in UBCD!

A little idea that might make it even niftier: include lm-sensors package, so that RAM SPD data could be accessed.

A bigger idea: Mostly, when I burn UBCD on CD, I would just as soon fill up the whole 700MB, instead of wasting all that storage space. So, I'd love to see a maxi-UBCD including a whole set of mini-Linux distros, such as Puppy Linux. I've been surprised that this kind of thing isn't done more -- still time for UBCD to be a leader...

I can add lm-sensors (156K) as a module to Parted Magic:
http://beefdrapes.partedmagic.com/modules/

If you want more distributions in UBCD, you have to include them yourself.
You can take a look at http://ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=6. The tutorials are for UBCD411, so the steps are not always exactly the same, but once you understand the principle, it is easy.

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Download Ultimate Boot CD v5.0: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
Use Parted Magic for handling all partitioning task: http://partedmagic.com/

I've been exploring the Parted Magic in UBCD50B12 today.

It is not easy to start this PM. On ASUS P4PE with Toshiba LCD TV there is great trouble with the 1360x768 video mode, a common Linux problem. Sometimes it is possible to get a display, but the default fonts are so small they are almost impossible to read, and I can't find any way to change the font size. I could not find any way to force this mode to start up every time, and I could not find any way to force it into 1024x768, where the fonts might be readable.

On Toshiba Satellite A215-S7437 laptop, it starts in Xorg, looks kind of beautiful, but if you try to use it the display gets weird-ghostly-glitchy-unusable. But restarting in Xvesa solves that problem.

It is very impressive how powerful this mini-Linux system is. DHCP works fine, Firefox works fine, USB flash drives mount.

# modprobe eeprom
loads the /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/eeprom/0-0050 that you need to access SPD data. That option seems to be a standard part of the kernel after 2.4. And that is all you need to access the raw SPD, lm_sensors/i2c-tools package not required. Then all you need is a working copy of decode-dimms.pl script.

Parted Magic includes Perl 5.10.0. Everything ALMOST works to get SPD, but not quite. decode-dimms.pl aborts with the message:
"Can't locate POSIX.pm in @INC."

Maybe it would be possible for future versions of UBCD to include at least the decode-dimms.pl script and whatever POSIX.pm etc it depends on?

Of course, if you can include the whole lm_sensors package and get it working, that would be ideal -- but note that you'd want to be sure to include i2c-tools also, which has been sort of split off and is the part that contains decode-dimms.pl now.

I find lm-sensors to be mainly useful in combination with stress testing, since I want to evaluate cooling at full load. I'd prefer lm-sensors in the cpustress image, or alternatively cpuburn/prime95/... + lm-sensors in pmagic (the latter is probably easier, but harder to use since you have to start the stress test and figure out the number of cores yourself). Not much point in having one image with tools to stress the computer but no way to monitor it, and another image to monitor it without being able to stress it.

Since I don't usually have a climate-controlled room available, knowing how close a CPU is to the Tmax is the only way to know if it will survive a hot summer day.

I've previously used StressLinux for this purpose, but by now it's horribly outdated and quite large for what it does. I've also hacked RIP (the CD version) to include this functionality in the past, but it was quite labor-intensive.

I use a Asus P4PE with a ATI 9700 Pro and 17" CRT and it works fine, your problem would more than likely be with the video card and/or LCD TV/Display.