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Grub-booting memtest86 on x86 hardware

Submitted by nomad on Tue, 2008-07-08 09:28.Linux | Unix

It is trivial to set things up so you are able to select memtest86 as a boot option in GRUB:

Download the latest memtest source from http://www.memtest86.com.

Extract and follow the instructions in the README that comes with it to compile. Copy the resulting memtest.bin to /boot and edit /etc/grub.conf to have the following 3 lines:

title Memtest86
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/memtest.bin

Make sure you reboot to test.

In theory this should work with any x86 OS + bootloader. I am doing this with RHEL 4 + GRUB.

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Even easier way?
Submitted by freiheit on Tue, 2008-07-08 16:37.

This seems even easier: stick this into your kickstart postscript for rhel4 (or just run it, of course):

up2date memtest86+
memtest-setup

(replace "up2date" with "yum install" for rhel5)

I do that in my kickstarts. Yes, it's the http://www.memtest86.org/ fork instead. I've never figured out if I should care significantly whether I'm running memtest86 or memtest86+ and I went with the path of most laziness: use the redhat package.

I've rarely used that, even though all my servers have it waiting for me. What I've actually used is PXE. Copy the memtest86+ (I assume this will work with memtest86 just as well) into the same directory that your linux kernels for installs go, and then add something like this to /tftpboot/linux-install/pxelinux.cfg/default:

label m
  kernel memtest86+-2.01.bin

Has the added bonus that you can run memtest on a system that's having trouble getting installed, or as a pre-install burn-in test.

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