Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2015 11:01:37 -0400 From: Quartz <quartz@sneakertech.com> To: "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam@hiwaay.net> Cc: "FreeBSD Questions !!!!" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: [(borderline) OT]: memtest question Message-ID: <55E46C51.2090109@sneakertech.com> In-Reply-To: <55E3AFB4.9050607@hiwaay.net> References: <55E3AFB4.9050607@hiwaay.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> I downloaded Passmark memtest.......... You asked this question at the right time, I just had to deal with all of this only last week. Here's the situation: The memory testing landscape is currently a big ol' pile of shit. memtest86+ has had only three updates in the past five years, with the most recent (5.01) being in '13. It does not support UEFI booting (crashes and random errors), native 64 bit (it uses a PAE hack), can't really handle ddr4, and has never supported ECC ram or other options. As far as anyone can tell the developer(s) dropped off the face of the earth. Although a bootable ISO is available for download from the website, it's NOT a hybrid ISO meaning it has to be burned to a physical CD. All of the other files on the site are *just* the memtest application binaries. If you want to put these on a bootable usb stick, you'll have to, manually, format a stick yourself from the ground up with your own bootloader and everything and then install the memtest binary into that. The website offers a program to do this for you but as you discovered it's a Windows EXE. Linux and Unix users are expected to figure it out themselves. My best advice (if just burning a CD isn't an option) is to find some Linux distro or utility live-cd that offers a hybrid ISO or direct USB image that also comes with memtest86+. I *think* the latest Ubuntu's come with 5.01. Gparted-Live only has 4.x for some reason. PassMark is their own can of shit. Starting with version 5.x, they completely dropped support for BIOS booting and went UEFI only, ostensibly to provide a 'better experience' but really so that they could sell a new thing that was closed source. Unfortunately, UEFI is still half broken on a lot of hardware and their new program loads all sorts of extra shit that requires extra hardware support accordingly, so it fails/hangs/crashes about as often as not. Their USB image still lets you boot into the old 4.x BIOS version, but as with memtest86+, there's no support for new chipsets/64bit/ddr4/ecc/etc. Basically, you want to test a server that's a couple years old that doesn't have UEFI? eat a dick. You want to test a new machine with the latest chipset but it has a buggy UEFI? eat a dick. You want to do pretty much anything other than testing a commodity desktop from five years ago? eat a dick. Can you tell I'm bitter about all this?
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?55E46C51.2090109>