Memtest86

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I recently come across an old laptop, a core2Duo T5450 with 2GB RAM that wouldn't boot the 2GB minimum ShredOS (with the full complement of drivers). It failed with kernel errors. However, ShredOS lite did boot and worked perfectly. The question is why? So one of the first things I do is check the RAM with memtest86.

Sure enough as can be seen from the memtest86 snapshot below, it detected errors between ~ 0.8GB and 1.2GB. That explains why ShredOS lite worked. ShredOS lite would have loaded in the first 512MB so would never have come across the bad memory unless you were wiping maybe 20 drives and it would therefore have needed to allocate more RAM for the buffers which would have taken it into the bad memory area.

So, getting to the point I'm trying to make, as the integrity of the hardware is so important when you are repurposing hardware, especially the integrity of RAM which can generate some very obscure errors when only a few locations are bad, should we include memtest86 as a boot option in grub, much like other distros do.

Personally I think we should include it. I'm assuming the extra size increase in the .iso/.img would be minimal but I need to check that.

I just wondered what others thought, add memtest86? Yes or no?

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I've installed memtest86+ v7.20 in ShredOS for all defconfigs and modified the isolinux and grub2 boot menus. Currently running tests before merging in the next day or two.

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Merged memtest86+ #462