Memtest mystery

[Timothy Murphy]

I recently had a problem on an ancient Dell Inspiron 610 laptop
(my wife's work machine). I solved the problem,
but I had wondered at one point if the RAM was faulty.

So I re-booted the machine with a Fedora-14/KDE Live CD in,
and booted into memtest86+ .
This threw up hundreds of errors.
I took the memory module out, and tried the same thing
with this module on another laptop running Fedora-14.
This brought up a similar number of errors.
(I didn't check if they were the same errors,
but they seemed to be in roughly the same place on the module.)

I tried the same test with other RAM on various machines,
and they all passed the test normally.

However, I found that there was a diagnostic test in the BIOS 
on the Dell Inspiron; at least the test was brought up 
on entering the BIOS by pressing F12.
This procedure tested the memory (for about 30 minutes)
and found no fault in it.
(It also tested the CPU, cache memory, etc,
taking about 90 minutes in all.)

This has left me slightly puzzled.
Can memtest86 actually throw up errors on good modules?




-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland