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I am running Ubuntu from flash drive and I would like to run memtest in terminal mode as multiple processes, I see file resides in boot directory but not able to execute as I get message "permission denied" not able to make the file executable either.

ankit7540
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Baljinder Badyal
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    My /boot directory has no memtest. There is a memtest86+.bin though. Could you type exactly the directory name and command name? FTR you need to add sudo in front of most commands where extra permission is required. Also memory tests are usually run from Grub menu and not in multi-threaded environments like Linux. – WinEunuuchs2Unix Nov 12 '16 at 01:28

1 Answers1

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memtest is usually run separately to a Linux kernel (selected as a boot option instead of Ubuntu), although you could download a memtest package and run it from within Ubuntu with the following commands.

sudo apt-get install memtester
sudo memtester 1024 5

Running it separately to Ubuntu gives it greater access to the machine's memory, so is the preferred method.

See How to check for errors in RAM via linux? for more details.

Community
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Jeffrey Ross
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  • any way to run it multithreaded instead of a single thread? – Gizmo Feb 06 '18 at 21:25
  • This is preferable to say MemTest86 when you know for certain there is a memory instability that is easy to deterministically reproduce while Ubuntu is already up and running. For example, running JavaScript unit tests (via Jest + Node) causes a system to freeze and reboot if there is a RAM problem. It is preferable for a tool like memtester to find that fault instead. – Coder Guy Jun 06 '24 at 20:02