I have been using a company computer running Ubuntu 22.04. There are frequent and unexplained problems, like segmentation faults, stack errors, files disappearing, computer freezing or not booting, or turning off immediately after I turn it on. I don’t know what to do. The IT staff came to my office to check the computer and said “it was all good.” I am not allowed to boot from a USB stick or enter BIOS or open the case. I ran a command line memory check several times with no errors. There is an NVIDIA card, but it’s running X.org and usually headless. I mostly set up tasks via SSH.

What would you do?

  • @[email protected]OP
    1•5 months ago

    I can’t run memtest unfortunately. The option isn’t there and I don’t have permission to boot from a USB stick.

    • Avid Amoeba
      6•5 months ago

      If you have root you could theoretically add Memtest86+ to the boot order. There’s tools that allow adding boot entries in EFI. You could probably place a Memtest86+ binary in your EFI partition and register it with the EFI firmware. But I’m not suggesting to do it since you could make the machine unbootable and the problem might be on the storage path. I’m just thinking of should be possible.

      • @[email protected]OP
        7•5 months ago

        I can sudo. Last time I looked into this, Memtest86+ version 6 was required to work with UEFI but it wasn’t available for Ubuntu 22.04. Now it seems that 24.04 has it, so I might update and see if I can get the test running. Thanks for the suggestion!

        • Avid Amoeba
          2•5 months ago

          You can get the binary from the project’s website. Still not suggesting to f around with it.

          • Dave.
            3•5 months ago

            They should be able to put memtest on the boot partition and then break to an EFI shell on boot and Ioad it manually.

            There will be a bit of swearing and googling required but it’s doable in a way that doesn’t mess with the current boot arrangement.

    • exuEnglish
      1•5 months ago

      You could download stressapptest and run that memory benchmark in the normal system.

      I’m not sure how well the current version of Memtest does, but when I was overclocking I was told not to use it as it couldn’t reliably get memory to crash. (Funny problem to have). The two recommended tools are Windows only, so I found stressapptest as the best alternative.