MemTest
ArrowQuick uses a group of tools to test hardware that we see on our workbench. Two tools that are fundamental to discovering hardware issues are MemTest and SpinRite for memory and hard drive testing respectively. MemTest is available in versions for PCs and Macintoshes, which will talk about in this article.
MemTest+86 and Memtest86+ are both CD based bootable tools that run a series of memory tests and diagnostics on the random access memory in your PC system. Memtest86+ is at version 2.x now and is licensed under Gnu Public License (GPL). Versions are updated regularly to include new motherboard chipsets and to improve memory testing reliability.
MemTest86+ also is engineered to work on Intel Macintosh hardware, but what about the older PowerPC Mac memory architectures; are these users without a memory test alternative? The answer is found in Memtest OS X. Memtest OS X is a universal binary for MacOS X 10.3 and higher.
Memtest executes in 64-bit mode on PPC G5, Intel Xeon-based Mac Pros, and the latest Macbook Pro Core 2 Dual systems running MacOS 10.4 or later, allowing virtually any amount of installed ram to be tested. On all other systems, memtest executes in 32-bit mode with a maximum testable limit of 2 GB.
To run Memtest OS X, boot your Mac into single user mode (hold Command-S on boot), which puts you at the command prompt for the UNIX shell. There are instructions on how to run the program from the command line with the program. Basically at the command line type:
./memtest -all 3
This command will test all available memory in a loop of 3 sets of memory tests. This tends to catch flaky memory that might not fail on the first loop of the tests. You can also tell Memtest to write a log file to a specific hard drive location — like your user folder, so as to review them later on.
On a PC, after the memory test is done, remove the CD and reboot into Windows or Linux. On a Macintosh, type exit from the UNIX prompt and the Mac will exit single user mode and continue onto the login screen for Mac OS X.
