MemTest86 Technical Information

Booting MemTest86 from CD/DVD

Since MemTest86 v8, bootable CD/DVD ISO images are no longer supported for the following reasons:

  • CD/DVD boot support is inconsistent on UEFI systems, especially for older EFI implementations. See this page for details.
  • CD/DVD boot may not work out-of-the box; The BIOS must configured with the correct boot options (eg. boot order, disable CSM)
  • CD/DVD boot greatly reduces the MemTest86 functionality, due to being unable to write log/report files to disk
  • USB booting is faster, universally available & more compatible with new systems

However, for UEFI systems that can only boot via CD/DVD media (such as systems with older UEFI implementations, or systems that only support remote boot via CD-ROM emulation through the BMC or IP KVM devices), we provide an (unsupported) CD/DVD ISO image of MemTest86 Free Edition for download.

Download MemTest86 v10.0 Free ISO image