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Checking for bad RAM in a G4 PPC
Frem
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Long version:
I was recently gifted a Power Mac G4 tower. It has an AGP video card, 128Mb RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive. It's running OS 9, but I didn't receive the install CD with the machine.
Now, I know OS 9 wasn't the most stable operating system around, but the whole thing is freezing up left and right as soon as I open more than one or two programs at a time. This smells like bad RAM.
I know about memtest86, but that doesn't do me any good in PowerPC land. Is there some equivalent here?
There are two sticks of 64mb RAM in the machine currently (one looks like an aftermarket upgrade), and I've got five slightly sketchy sticks of assorted sizes yanked out of various aged desktops loitering around the room. I could try doing this the trial and error route, but that seems like a severe pain. Is it my only option?
TLDR:
I can haz memtest86 for PPC?
I was recently gifted a Power Mac G4 tower. It has an AGP video card, 128Mb RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive. It's running OS 9, but I didn't receive the install CD with the machine.
Now, I know OS 9 wasn't the most stable operating system around, but the whole thing is freezing up left and right as soon as I open more than one or two programs at a time. This smells like bad RAM.
I know about memtest86, but that doesn't do me any good in PowerPC land. Is there some equivalent here?
There are two sticks of 64mb RAM in the machine currently (one looks like an aftermarket upgrade), and I've got five slightly sketchy sticks of assorted sizes yanked out of various aged desktops loitering around the room. I could try doing this the trial and error route, but that seems like a severe pain. Is it my only option?
TLDR:
I can haz memtest86 for PPC?
Frem on
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If not, you can try and find an Apple Technician disk for that model through questionable means, but I've tried and that's hard.
Yopu should upgrade it to Tiger anyway, it'll be a lot easier.
I wouldn't, not with only 128mb of RAM. Minimum requirements call for 256mb.
Best option is to download and burn an ubuntu ppc disc and run memtest off of there or just start swapping out RAM.
Sometimes I have the most horrible dreams. Or maybe they are real. Do dead men dream?
Does the Ubuntu PPC disk have memtest? The normal Ubuntu distibution uses memtest86. I'm on a slow connection with a throughput limit, so I'd rather not download 600mb if it doesn't. I asked in the Ubuntu PPC IRC channel and nobody seemed to know what I was talking about.
I found the Apple Hardware Test disks online at Apple's website and used dmg2img to convert the Power Mac G4 disk dmg to an ISO I could burn from my Windows machine. Unfortunately, it claimed to be incompatible with the machine when I booted it.
I finally just started putting in a sick of RAM at a time and opening up tabs in Opera until the computer crashed. It turns out I have one good stick of 64mb ram, and one stick of 256mb ram which seems to die around the 190mb used mark. Further, I can't use them both at the same time, or the machine won't boot.
I'm getting some more PC100 from a friend, so having a memory testing app would still be really handy.