Memtest 86 on Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Live CD

Tim

This is probably only news to me, but I was working on another PC to add to my folding farm today. I had to unsolder one capacitor enough to raise it out of the motherboard about 1/8" so I could bend it over enough to get the 8800GT video card in.

What bonehead designs a motherboard with a tall capacitor right next to the PCI-E slot ?!?!?!?:banghead:

Anyhow, I had changed one of the 4 RAM sticks at the same time to give the computer an even 1.0 GB instead of 1.25 GB. Then the thing would not start up in XP.

Start in normal mode, safe mode, safe mode with networking, all failed. I felt it wasn't my capacitor mod, because it was still in contact with its original points, and I've done electronics work as a job for a long time. (Not now, but that's another story).

So I whipped out my 8.04 Hardy Heron copy to test it on that. I don't know much about Linux other than I can use the Live CD to see if the hardware is working right.

It didn't even load, it showed an error.

So after about the 3rd time trying it, I noticed in the list of startup options "Test memory for errors".

So I hit it, and it showed 100,000 errors in about a minute.

I shut the computer down, replaced the RAM stick I replaced, and tried again to boot it in XP. This time it worked fine.

So I put the Ubuntu CD back in to run its memory test. This time I noticed "Memtest 86 version 1.70" at the top of the screen.

Cool. Now I don't need to burn an ISO or whatever of Memtest 86 on a floppy or flash drive, I'll just use it from my Ubuntu CD! :bigggrin:

So far it is 15 minutes into its first pass with 0 memory errors so far!

mirage

The fastest way to use memtest is to prepare a bootable memory stick and keep a copy of memtest executable on it. It is a tiny executable and the latest version is 4.0.