bad ram in DIMM1 need to limp by till monday, can I temporarily disable a memory slot?

Question

Got to work, started windows, immediately blue screened as soon as I logged in. After a few tries I ran diagnostics and found the ram in dimm1 was bad.

I can boot into Ubuntu and it runs pretty well I can at least get some work done this way but I do get frequent lock-ups which I suspect are ram related.

Is there anyway to temporarily just disable that memory? I have 16 gig so I would have plenty left without that chip.

I cannot physically remove it as the laptop (dell xps 9530) requires a t-2 driver to open and I don’t have one here. Also the buses home don’t start till 3pm and its only 11am so I am stuck for now.

Ideas?

:) yeah I thought about that. its quite a hike to get to office depot from here. I haven’t ruled it out yet though. — Paul Wade, Jun 27 '14 at 16:37
There is something called the BadMEM project that aims at not using bad memory units. See here. — Jos, Jun 27 '14 at 16:40
yeah I looked into that but didn't understand it at all. I am new to Linux. I guess I was hoping there might be some magic "turn off dimm1" check box :) — Paul Wade, Jun 27 '14 at 16:43
Your best bet would be booting with the memmap= parameter. See here. — Jos, Jun 27 '14 at 16:53

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:23

Apparently (I don't want to test this) GRUB2 has an option allowing the masking of bad memory cells, on a byte-by-byte basis. You will need to use the memtest boot options to determine the bad adresses, and list them in the grub configuration file as

GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

using your addresses, of course. The links I found referencing this are

Exclude bad ram bytes

https://blog.hartwork.org/?p=1712

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BadRAM#BADRAM_setting_in_Grub2

http://foundations-bugs.gmang.org/2014-April/187827.html

bad ram in DIMM1 need to limp by till monday, can I temporarily disable a memory slot?

1 Answers1

Linked

Related