Testing RAM for memory issues

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This page will guide you towards running a copy of Ubuntu from RAM to test RAM for issues. A tool like BlueScreenView may tell you that bluescreens are being caused by ntoskrnl.exe with "Bug Check String" of MEMORY_MANAGEMENT, which would be a reason to be testing RAM.

Download Ubuntu

Download page
I used Ubuntu server. The desktop version might work, but I don't know how to get into the shell on that path. Page with info on how to create a bootable USB stick: Ubuntu tutorial

Boot from USB/DVD Drive

F12 is a common boot menu. The other steps from the Ubuntu tutorial above will be able to help you better than I can.

Memtester

The first screen that comes up when it boots into the try/install image has an option for Try or Install Ubuntu Server. Select that.

This will cause a lot of text to fly by. After it was done, I was on a select language screen installer page. At that point, Ctrl+Alt+F2 will drop out of the installer and into the shell.

From the shell we need to install Memory Tester application. Run sudo apt install memtester. This shouldn't take more then a minute or two. An internet connection will be required for this.

Now that memtester is installed, we need to know how much RAM we want to test against. free -h will tell us information about the ram. The right column "Available" tells us how many gigabytes we are going to test. Floor round that value to an integer. Run sudo memtester 30G 1 where 30 is replaced with the available RAM you saw in the last step.

Running a full test of the memtester can take a while if everything is good. If the word FAILURE appears, you'll know you have found a problem with your RAM, and you don't need to finish the memory tester.

Narrowing Down the Bad Stick

You likely have multiple sticks of RAM, and hopefully only 1 is bad. Turn off and unplug your machine, take out all but 1 stick of RAM, and do the memtester steps again. After about 10 of those test succeed, or at least the test that you saw the error with all the sticks installed, should be enough to validate a stick of ram and move onto the next one.

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