memory counting using memtest86

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

memtest86 (v 3.2) shows me that my laptop has a bad RAM address, at
0b5d9270. It also writes, beside the failing address, what appears to
be a memory count, in this case it writes 181.5MB.
However, when I convert 0b5d9270 from hex to dec, it corresponds to
190.7MB. This is almost 10MB difference and I'd like to find out which
one is correct because if I have to cut off anything about the lowest
bad address, I'll lose 10MB more if the first number is correct. Any
idea of what's going on? I've searched the net for similar situations
and all I could find is that my case is not unique, i.e. other people
report addresses that are always higher than the MB count that
memtest86 gives. To my surprise, nobody asks why ...

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

JuanPedro wrote:
> memtest86 (v 3.2) shows me that my laptop has a bad RAM address, at
> 0b5d9270. It also writes, beside the failing address, what appears to
> be a memory count, in this case it writes 181.5MB.
> However, when I convert 0b5d9270 from hex to dec, it corresponds to
> 190.7MB. This is almost 10MB difference and I'd like to find out which
> one is correct because if I have to cut off anything about the lowest
> bad address, I'll lose 10MB more if the first number is correct. Any
> idea of what's going on? I've searched the net for similar situations
> and all I could find is that my case is not unique, i.e. other people
> report addresses that are always higher than the MB count that
> memtest86 gives. To my surprise, nobody asks why ...

It's perhaps the difference between decimal megabytes and binary
megabytes. Decimal mega is 1000*1000 = 1,000,000; binary mega is
1024x1024 = 1,048,576 (actually defined as 2 ^20). 190.7 decimal
megabytes = 190.7 decimal Mbytes x 0.9537 binary Mbyte/decimal Mbyte =
181.87 binary Mbytes. It's close but not exactly what you report.

In any event, it is the pointer to the error, the hex address, that is
important to error correction and there is no confusion about what that
is. The author of memtest86 will entertain questions - consult the
readme notes for the email address and the necessary format for the
subject line.

Q