(OT) utility to test motherboard and ram

This morning I tried to install SuSE Linux 7.1, Slack 8.0 and Mandrake 8.1 in a machine with: - MSI (Micro Start ) mobo - 256 Ram - Quantum 20 Gb hd - Amd Athlon And at all times I had errors, with SuSE and slack errors while copying files and with Mandrake a segmentation fault (and already changed the ram once)... Any suggestion, utilty (something that I can copy into a diskette and boot with to run some trials over my hardware), or procedure to see what is going wrong? Thanks, Raul