Is my computer not starting for the memory test?
Is my computer not starting for the memory test?
I put together a spare desktop from old stuff to run background tasks that would otherwise leave my normal PC sitting idle. It runs okay now, but yesterday I got a surprise problem: it won't start up Memtest86. I've already cleared the BIOS and set everything back to default. The parts are: Phenom II x4 955, GA-78LMT-S2PT, two 2 GB sticks of DDR3 memory, and no dedicated graphics card. Hard drives and boot disks are all installed as needed. I believe I ran Memtest86 on this machine before but aren't sure for certain. I have two old USB flash drives that both worked long ago and are now detected by the spare computer. One is UEFI-enabled with Memtest86 v9.0, and the other isn't UEFI with Memtest86+ 5.01. The spare machine came from before UEFI was common, so I'm not surprised it won't start with the first drive. It just hangs at "Verifying DMI pool data....". The second drive is a legacy bootable one. After saying 'Verifying DMI pool data', it just says 'Boot error'. Any help would be great!
Did you try making the utility on your USB drive again? Since the installer could have been tricky, maybe try an older version from 2009 or later...?
Thanks. I've been wanting to do this for a while now. But each of my thumb drives and even SD/µSD cards seems set up only for one specific job. I should have more somewhere though, but I lost them at some point. I really want to stop overwriting the existing memtest86 boot disk—a 16MB card—so that I can compare it with whatever works right now. I'll check for other media again later when I get a chance. Just by the way, I made this old disk by taking an MS-DOS one and removing the files, then copying the memtest86 stuff onto it. That happened about 9 to 10 years ago, roughly as long ago as that motherboard has been here. What really bugs me is that even though it seems so long gone, it still boots up other computers in my house.