hard disk prep for memtest86+

[blah44]

I would like to boot and run memtest86+ but have no floppies and CDROM boot is not an option for this machine.

I tried writing the binary to a spare hard drive directly, which did not work. Then I tried creating a basic MBR and wrote the binary to the first partition, still no good. Any other ideas?

 

[wblock@]

This is not a FreeBSD question, but FreeBSD can be used to write the image. There is a USB stick image for download from http://www.memtest86.com/download.htm that should work from either a USB stick or a hard drive. Write it with FreeBSD: dd if=imagename of=/dev/da0 bs=64k.

 

[blah44]

Yeah, I realize that it is not strictly FreeBSD but it is a port and I could see a lot of FreeBSD users wanting to test their memory. This looks to be the best way so far.

I tried writing to /dev/da0 with no dice. Then I created an MBR partition and tried writing to /dev/da0s1 and still would not boot. Not sure what I am doing wrong yet.

 

[blah44]

Any other ideas? Kinda of bummed I cannot get this to work.

 

[wblock@]

Did you uncompress the archive after downloading it?

# tar -xvzf memtest86-usb.tar.gz
# dd if=memtest86-usb.img of=/dev/da0 bs=64k

 

[blah44]

Did you uncompress the archive after downloading it?

# tar -xvzf memtest86-usb.tar.gz
# dd if=memtest86-usb.img of=/dev/da0 bs=64k

Oh, I added from ports and was using the /boot/opt file that resulted. It does not claim to be compressed. I suppose I should try this other distribution, though. Thanks!

 

[wblock@]

/boot/opt does not sound like a disk image.

 

[blah44]

That was a directory name. The file inside was definitely x86 binary code.

 

[blah44]

I think it was a ports problem after all!

When I download the binary direct from the memtest86+ web site it works great. When I use the file installed by the port, it simply hangs forever.

 

[wblock@]

Please enter a PR: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/. Could be that it requires a certain compiler or environment.