Diagnosing faults in a hardware appliance. Information is read by a hand-held reader from one or more contactless tags associated with one or more components in a hardware appliance. One or more component faults and/or issues are identified based on the read information. A query is formed based on the identified one or more component faults and/or issues. A diagnostic database in the hand-held reader is queried, based on the formed query, and one or more query results are displayed in a ranked order on a display of the hand-held reader. In one aspect of the embodiments, the information read from the one or more contactless tags includes a pointer to a datastore in one of the one or more components. An ad hoc wireless network connection is established with the hardware appliance, and information in the datastore is downloaded over the connection.