# hard disk prep for memtest86+



## blah44 (Aug 27, 2014)

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@ (Aug 27, 2014)

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 (Aug 27, 2014)

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 (Sep 12, 2014)

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


----------



## wblock@ (Sep 12, 2014)

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 (Sep 12, 2014)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> Did you uncompress the archive after downloading it?
> 
> 
> ```
> ...



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@ (Sep 13, 2014)

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


----------



## blah44 (Sep 16, 2014)

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


----------



## blah44 (Sep 26, 2014)

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@ (Sep 26, 2014)

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


----------

