Noob needs help w/ Memtest86+

Hey guys, I'm trying to run Memtest86+ and am having no luck at all. I burned my .iso CD as instructed, then tried to boot up my computer. The program never begins to run. I went and googled using the program and had no luck. I tried searching the forums but couldn't get past the first page of results.

Can anyone help a brother out?

Like the first reply said... your boot order is set to boot from your hard drive first. You'll probably need to press "DEL", "ESC" or maybe F2/F10 immediately after powering up your system (I'd just recommend tapping the keys repeatedly) in order to access the BIOS. This should be in your manual that came with your motherboard. Once in, somewhere in there (it varies from BIOS to BIOS) you'll see a screen that allows you to select which devices your computer attempts to boot from first. There's really no reason not to leave your CD ROM/Optical Drive as the first boot device. Just make sure that your primary hard drive appears SOMEWHERE (the bottom is fine) in that list. At that point, save your settings and restart your computer. Assuming you burned the ISO image correctly it should boot off the CD.

Btw, Memtest86 has gotta be one of the best troubleshooting applications ever... it's saved me a LOT of grief.

I had actually already changed my boot order to CD followed by HD without luck... I'll try it again and see what I can come up with.

Did you try downloading from here (latest version 1.70):
http://www.memtest.org/#downiso
and download this file:
Download - Pre-Compiled Bootable ISO (.zip)
and then unzip it (extract it) to get the actual .iso file?

When making the CD, did you make sure to open the .iso file in your burning program, not drag it onto the window (which would create a normal CD with the .iso file on it, not a bootable image like you want)?

What happens if you type "dir" at the screen above without the quotes? The A: drive in this case is a RAMDRIVE loaded from the CD.

Try to look at the readme.txt file. I think if you manually run the exe file you will get the memtest menu.

I switched the drive and upon trying to run I got the posted result for both v1.65 & 1.70

If you have a USB floppy drive ($20.00), you could boot off of the USB floppy and automatically run memtest86+.

You need to use Nero to burn a CD from the iso image on your hard drive. There is no need to copy the iso file to you CD. The iso file is essentially an image of what needs to be created on the CD. Nero uses this image to burn the original CD contents on your empty CD.

As Jim noted, this was your problem. You need to *open* the .iso file as a new project; copying it onto the CD as you did just copies the file and doesn't *use it* to create a CD project.
The "Bootable CD" settings is also wrong, since the image file provides all the data/info for creating the CD.

Sounds like you finally got it working -- good job!

prime95 tells you about overall system stability and results reliability. When prime95 fails, you don't know what exactly failed, so it is no substitute for a separate memory test. When prime95 fails, all you know is that something is wrong. Two real real examples that happened to me:


Example #1: I put in two sticks of DDR memory to run in dual mode on a Barton system. prime95 fails. Which stick is the problem? prime95 can't tell you, but memtest86 picked it out right away.

Example #2: I put a new cpu/memory in my system and did a slight overclock. It ran memtest all day long. Then, I booted into windows and ran prime95.... crash. The whole system rebooted. It turned out that the cpu and memory are fine with the overclock, but the hard disk/motherboard wasn't. Left alone, the system would crash about once a week. Under prime95, the system would reboot in about 20 minutes. So, prime95 doesn't tell you anything except that they system is unstable. And when it does fail, you still have to figure out what the problem is (memtest86+).

Ooohh, that's very nice. Thank you very much for that gem!