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?

  • LogarithmicCamel@feddit.ukOP
    21·
    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@lemmy.ca
      3·
      5 months ago

      If you have root you could theoretically add Memtest86+ to the boot order theoretically. 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. I’m just thinking of should be possible.

      • LogarithmicCamel@feddit.ukOP
        6·
        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@lemmy.ca
          2·
          5 months ago

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

          • Dave.@aussie.zone
            3·
            4 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.

    • exu@feditown.comEnglish
      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.