# Memtest-86 crashes during test 2.



## carled (Dec 10, 2007)

Hi all. Got my sisters pc which has been randomly crashing. Various "stop" errors that led me to eventually trash the OS and reinstall, suspecting malware/virus.

Reinstalled XP Home and all seemed fine until I started copying some files around at which point the crashes started happening again. Suspecting the RAM, I d/loaded memtest-86 and the fun began.

On starting up, memtest kicked in and immediately crashed - showed bottom half of screen in blue with series of errors and numbers in white.

Took out one stick of ram, ran test again - got into test 2 a few seconds then crashed. Same thing if I put in the other stick of memory on its own. Now suspicious as both sticks were unlikely to be flaky, I d/loaded latest bios and flashed the M/board (MSI 6728). 

When I rebooted, memtest got a lot further... and I thought it was going to be fine, but when it got into Test 2, (top of Memtest showed 18% done) the error count in the right hand column against test 2 just started climbing and climbing. Went to get a cup of tea only to return to see the same crashed memtest screen, bottom half only of screen showing.

Have brought PC into work this morning and swapped out the cpu as we had a compatible 478-based Celeron knocking about. Put that in, started up test and it ran for a while, then whilst I was looking away, crashed again!

I then swapped out the vga card and put in a known working one. This time I watched the test. It gets into test 2, the errors start racking up, the count gets to about 16,000 then the screen goes black for a few seconds, then the bottom half of memtest reappears, it runs one more test quickly (looks like test zero?) then crashes and freezes...

Is this looking like a faulty motherboard, would you say? No signs of capacitor blowout...


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## coolday (Jul 6, 2005)

Try the ram's, vga card and cpu on some other board.


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## carled (Dec 10, 2007)

gagh.... hardware not cooperating!

The only pentium-based machine in the whole office is old... the cpu (celeron) from it works in my sister's machine, but my sister's cpu doesn't work in the office machine (and after trying that, it now no longer works in my sister's machine either... I've killed it :upset 

I tested the office machine with memtest. It ran for hours with no errors before I got bored. I put the Ram from that machine into my sister's and it still crashed almost straight away. The ram from my sister's machine in the office machine also works fine.

As she now needs a new CPU anyway, looks like a CPU/motherboard bundle is on the cards...!


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## coolday (Jul 6, 2005)

try putting a new ram


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## koala (Mar 27, 2005)

You need to run memtest for at least 10 passes on one stick of RAM at a time to avoid false errors. Normally if you get any errors at all, the stick is faulty and needs to be replaced, but as you've tested the RAM in another computer (one stick at a time?) then it looks like the motherboard.

Have you tried cleaning any dust out of the RAM slots with a can of compressed air?

Have you tried setting the BIOS to Default or Optimized? Have you overclocked anything?


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