2021-11-21
So I’m still, in between tinkering with FPGAs, trying to settle upon a Linux distro for desktop use. I still keep coming back to Mint Mate edition despite the annoyances I’ve found with the latest version, and having installed both an SSD and some extra RAM in the machine I’m about to migrate to, I figured I’d better run some tests. The Ubuntu (and thus Mint) live install contains Memtest86+ so I booted from USB, selected the test and watched the machine lock up half way through the very first test.
Odd, since the machine actually runs just fine…
It turns out the version of Memtest86+ in the current Ubuntu LTS is completely and horribly broken.
The solution to my problem was to install memtest86+ using apt, then remove it again. The removal doesn’t remove the meta files, so provided there’s an image of the correct name in /boot it remains in the grub menu. Therefore, one can download a non-broken binary, copy it to /boot, run grub-update and *now* the RAM test actually works.
One side-effect, however, is that the grub setup installed by the USB live system when installing Linux is somewhat different from what you get when you subsequently run grub-update from the installed-and-running system – I had to edit some config files to get the menu back..