Memory Test For PCs

My domain controller started to blue screen today. This is an old box so my first thought was the old hard drive was failing. At time it acted like the drive was bad. I got errors that files were missing. Even coming up in safe mode with a command prompt at one point indicated there was no C: drive. I was about to pull the drive, rebuild and restore from backup. Something did not appear to be right that it was the disk drive. I got different stop messages and the system would fail at different points in time. For the most part I could boot the system and logon. A few minutes after logon I would blue screen. Each time with a different stop message. I got thinking that I may have a memory problem. The box has two memory cards (PC-100) memory: 128k and a 256k board. I found on Microsoft's site a nice memory test utility. You have can create a boot floppy or a boot CD from the file you download. I chose to create the boot floppy. A big CD....All of 1-meg! Boot from the CD and the test immediately starts. It found several errors but was unable to tell me which memory board the problem was on. I shut down the box and pulled one of the boards. With only one memory board I re-ran the test. One board passed the other failed. Of course it was the 256-meg board. I got the domain controller back up on 128-megs. Runs slower but at least the lab is back online.

The memory utility is mtinst.exe. Has a nice users guide you can print.