SRM Memory Test

I haven't quite made it to the "Attempt Installing OpenBSD" portion yet
because I noticed something odd on an Alpha Personal Workstation 433
that I got off of eBay. The ARC/AlphaBIOS would occasionally report
256MB rather than the usual 384MB. This weirdness was intermittent.

I kicked the system into SRM Console mode and I've been trying to run
memtest to no avail. Running even the most simple tests seems to
basically lock up the system since the command fails to ever exit even
if you let it run for a couple hours to try completing two passes.

    >>> memtest -rb -p 2

If you background the memtest process and run show_status, it seems to
pass at least once?

>>> memtest -rb -p 2 &
>>> show_status
ID        Program   Device   Pass   Hard/Soft   Written   Read
-------- --------- -------- ------ ----------- --------- ------
00000001      idle system       0      0    0         0      0 
0000004F   memtest memory       1      0    0         0      0 


Using >>>kill_diags afterwards only locks up the system.

I've tried reading up on the SRM Console in the user guide (link below) 
http://ftp.digital.com/pub/Digital/info/semiconductor/literature/srmcons.pdf
and I've searched around for more detailed instructions on the web. I
found a cryptic post to the DebianAlpha list about using
>>>dynamic -r
to figure out values to use with memtest switches but I doubt the guys'
goal was to test all available memory.

Though I've reduced the system memory to 128MB (two DIMS) so I can test
the pairs, I'm still not sure if there's some problem with the memory or
if *I* am the problem.

When you guys use memtest, how do you do it?

Thanks,
JCR