Re: [LUG] SuSE memory test

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Adrian Midgley wrote:
> One of the options on the boot menu for SuSE is memory test.
>
> I have a machine that did random (?) failures with an NT install and similar
> with SuSE 7.2 after about 55 MBytes of packages and I left memtest running
> and notice there are some errors racking up, 1500 or so so far as I left....
>
> How reliable is this at indicating what is wrong?

As others have indicated it is good, but....

I have hardware that reserves memory for video cards in the BIOS
(Top 4MB), memtest totally misses this, and will report errors
for the last 4MB of memory. So always worth checking if the
memory block it is referring to is "special" in some way.

Duing boot Linux sees the reservation, and reports 124MB of
memory from a 128MB system, and never touches the last 4MB.

Always worth opening the box and reseating the memory chips,
with a bit of a dust and some alcohol on the contacts if they
look mucky ;). You probably don't want to use this hardware for
tele-surgery!

I bet other wacky hardware (CPU/Bus etc) would produce "random"
problems with memtest. Is it always the same areas of memory?

Or as HP's error manual put it succintly after 2 pages of other
explanations for a certain error message, "remember a bus error
can be caused by an error on the bus".

Simon

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