What happens if you run Memtest in a Virtual Machine?

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bholstege

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 31, 2007
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I was wondering if you could test certain amounts of RAM by assigning that amount to a virtual machine, then running memtest in that VM. Would it show errors, or just crash the program if it ran into problem? Do you think this could work?
 
Theoretically it should work, but the issue is the guest OS is using the RAM from the host computer/OS so there is no way to specifically assign any given portion of the host machine's RAM to do this, aka check specific memory ranges as you seem to be hinting at.

Sure, it'll work as I've done this myself just to verify the CD I just made (usually the memtest86 bootable one) actually boots. Easier to use a VM for testing a freshly burned bootable CD than having to reboot my main desktop or fire up a laptop or secondary machine just for that purpose.
 
you don't assign ranges of ram to a vm, it gets random chunks all over. Other than that it ought to work fine.
 
I'm downloading Virtual PC 2007 right now. What I think might happen is that errors will crash the VM instead of showing up in Memtest
 
Well, some odd things happened. First, it identified my CPU properly, but said it was running at 2.8tghz. It also identified the amount of cache, but said the cache was operating at the same bandwidth as my RAM.

It identified the chipset as an Intel i440BX, I don't know what that is. As for memory testing, it seems to be going very fast.
 
bholstege said:
It identified the chipset as an Intel i440BX, I don't know what that is.
Click to expand...

:eek:

It's only the greatest chipset ever produced by Intel. It was the power behind some of the best overclocker's motherboards ever, back when Abit was king and Asus actually meant quality. I still have a working BF6 that runs a Coppermine Pentium-3 550MHz (via a slotket adapter) at 770MHz. Perhaps I'm seeing things through the foggy lens of nostalgia, but the 440BX simply rocked.
 
Bones said:
:eek:

It's only the greatest chipset ever produced by Intel. It was the power behind some of the best overclocker's motherboards ever, back when Abit was king and Asus actually meant quality. I still have a working BF6 that runs a Coppermine Pentium-3 550MHz (via a slotket adapter) at 770MHz. Perhaps I'm seeing things through the foggy lens of nostalgia, but the 440BX simply rocked.
Click to expand...

QFT. 440bx is quite possibly the greatest piece of silicon ever created. I still have a system here running a Tyan Tiger 100 (440bx dual slot 1 board) with dual 800mhz pentium 3's and 768mb of ram. 440bx rocked so hardcore that even years later intel had trouble selling newer chipsets (like i810) because there was no reason to upgrade from the bx.

anyway, running memtest would theoretically work but you couldn't test a specific range of memory addresses because of the way that protected mode computing works. In protected mode, programs do not have direct access to memory addresses--it is all handled internally by the mmu in the cpu. So the memory allocated to the vm could go anywhere and you have no way to control of figure out where it is.
 
I couldn't think of a reason to need to run Memtest in a VM. You'd be using the hosts memory anyway, so as long as that is fine, then so should the VM.

If you are having some weird issues with the VM, you could always give the free and better VirtualBox a try.
 
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