i believe and have been told that files on my HDD are getting altered by mysterious forces (IE the files MD5 Hash changes over time). what programs are there that can stress test a hard drive? im not after a program that only utilizes the S.M.A.R.T functions of a hard disk.

what memory test programs are there? i know of only memtest and memtest plus... are there any others and are there any decent windows based ones?

im mainly after windows based programs but DOS is ok.

could be a ram issue. i've had thiss happen. turned out, the checksum/hash was computed incorrectly because of a defective stick of ram. worse yet, the memtest didn't pick up on that. only when that stick of ram failed did i realize that it was the cause of the problem. usually, if ram is going bad, you start getting random software crashes.

as for data getting physically altered on the hdd, you usually get a lot of read errors as well. do you get either of these two symptoms?

If you have Vista, there's a Memory Test program included in the installation disc.

could be a ram issue. i've had thiss happen. turned out, the checksum/hash was computed incorrectly because of a defective stick of ram. worse yet, the memtest didn't pick up on that. only when that stick of ram failed did i realize that it was the cause of the problem. usually, if ram is going bad, you start getting random software crashes.

Why could you have said this when my quake was constantly crashing :rolleyes:
The problem was, indeed, 'bad RAM'