wrote:
On Mon, 18 Dec 2017 21:15:58 -0500, Paul wrote:

The reason I worry about this sort of stuff, is I was
actually sent on a plane trip from work, to root cause
why we had excessive disk failures at a certain site
in the US. When I saw what they were doing, my
jaw dropped :-) And I haven't been the same since :-)
It's not only the UPS driver who has evil in his heart.

Paul



I would absolutely run a RAM test, may be nothing to do with the drive
Any PC you pull from storage, should have some
basic health tests done on it. There's no harm in trying
that. I did that on my new machine only a couple days
ago... just in case.

Paul
How do you test RAM?

Hopefully its a Windows program, not linux....


Windows does have a memory diagnostic.

On WinXP, you get a copy by downloading it.

On more modern Windows OSes, it's included on C: (but you
have to figure out where it's located of course).

https://web.archive.org/web/20070102...en/windiag.asp

(640KB - shirely a joke)
https://web.archive.org/web/20070102.../en/mtinst.exe

The virustotal scan suggests that might be installing
itself as a multiboot. I need to know this, to know whether
it's a good idea for me to click this or not :-) What it
might be doing, is adding an item to the boot menu, for a
boot-time memory test.

https://www.virustotal.com/#/file/ce...0ffbe/behavior

In any case, that's one way to do it. Try it out,
tell me what happened or something :-)

I *have* run the Windows memory tester on a later Windows,
but I cannot recollect right now what menu I saw it in. It's
possible it was testing while Windows was running, and it didn't
test every memory location (the 300MB of locations Windows is using).

*******

This one, you combine it with a blank floppy.

It tests every memory location, except "BIOS reserved" locations
totaling around 1MB or so. If it were to write to BIOS locations,
some BIOS call might crash later. There is actually a table the BIOS
presents, of locations "you must not touch".

http://www.memtest.org

The downloads are half way down that web page.

For example, the floppy in front of me, is this one. 274,506 bytes.

http://www.memtest.org/download/4.10....10.floppy.zip

The contents of the ZIP a

memtestp.bin
install64.bat
install.bat ---- insert blank floppy, run this one in Command Prompt
README.txt
dd.exe
rawrite.exe

What the file set does, is a sector-by-sector transfer of "memtestp.bin"
to the sectors of the floppy. When finished, if you try to list the
floppy "there is nothing on it". There is no file system on the floppy.

You insert the floppy later if you want and boot from it.

Once the 640x480 screen appears, the floppy contents are
stored in memory, so you can pop the floppy out and put it
away somewhere.

The "memtestp.bin" is like an OS and when the BIOS hands
off control, that program runs the whole machine and does
the memory test. After it has completed one pass, press
the esc key to exit and boot the OS again. You can stop
the test at any time by pressing that key.

If it finds errors, they're printed in the middle of the
screen. If there are too many errors, the error list will scroll.
When I had one completely dead memory chip, it scrolled... a lot.

Paul