Fault tracing with a bootable USB stick
I have a USB stick with several flavours of Linux* on (in?) it. I'm hoping to use it to soak test my Lenovo Ideapad S300-151BR.
The Lenovo freezes at will. Originally a Windows 10 machine, now dual-booting with Win.7. Freezes on both.
When booting from the USB stick, can I be certain that the HDD is totally unused by the machine? If I can eliminate that from suspicion, that would be a start.
I did try out a bootable CD with memtest; that didn't uncover any RAM problems.
*Ubuntu 16.04, Mint 18, Debian 8.5 Lxde, OpenSuse 13.2 KDE, Magia 5, Apricity OS Gnome, Elementary OS Freya, Bodhi 3 and Zorin OS Core 9.