RAM is expensive now. It has gone up in price by nearly 3x. There are less things we can do when RAM is this expensive. It used to cost $4/GiB, now about $16/GiB (Sri Lanka). The good news is you can likely still use the RAM module with one or more broken cells. The bad news is that in that for integrity it is better if you have ECC, but for normal use it is still likely okay to do this, just don’t run bank databases or bridge simulations on this.
MemTest86+ can be downloaded here. Please note down the faulty addresses too, it is important. Check thoroughly. If your tests passed but the computer shows symptoms of RAM errors, the error is likely in the buses (motherboard, likely in non-RAM areas and less likely but possibly in RAM bus too) or cables (HDD). Use a filesystem like ZFS and a volume manager like … ZFS (ZFS is both) so the CPU knows that the data is damaged in the disk/drive or while in transit. For anything remotely safety-critical, do not use NTFS/EXT4, use a modern one like ZFS or HAMMER2, but only with ECC RAM.
Be sure to blacklist adjacent addresses too, they use about 72 bits to store 64 bits, so be sure to blacklist around the 128 bits region (16 bytes) minimum for safety. If there are other faulty cells, you will know as you already have ECC and are on a SECDED system.
Non-ECC RAM errors are harder to detect, and there is likelihood that more memory cells might latch or become unusable as most cells have comparable write/read cycles. DO NOT USE ZFS WITH THIS. The solutions are the same.
How do I fix the bad RAM issues?
Use GRUB2 BadRAM addresses.
GRUB_BADRAM="ADDRESS,MASK,[ADDRESS,MASK[,ADDRESS,MASK]]"
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x00005555,0xffff0000" - RESERVE the 64K region where 0x00005555 is, as BAD.
FreeBSD has two solutions, one is using GRUB2 and the other is using the BadRAM program specified here (Thanks to Kim Øyhus).
The Kim Øyhus’ program is run like this:
gcc -o BadRAM BadRAM-FreeBSD_v0.0.c
# ./BadRAM 0x11111000 0xffffff00 &
./BadRAM [address] [mask]
This is a bit harder. There are multiple BadRAM drivers for Microsoft Windows (R).
Note: The article/text itself is not AI slop but the images refered might be.
Author: Rishikeshan Sulochana/Lavakumar
License: CC-BY 4.0