Posted: October 3, 2020

I’ve been having some file corruption issues on my PC, and I wanted to test my RAM. The standard choice for testing memory is Memtest86+.

It was surprisingly difficult to find information on making a Memtest86+ bootable USB drive on Linux. It seems that most people just use a bootable Linux install which includes Memtest86+.

First, I tried downloading the newest version Pre-Compiled Bootable ISO from memtest.org.

I inserted the USB drive, used lsblk to list my devices, and then ran:

dd if=/home/user/memtest86.iso of=/dev/sdc

dd can generally be used to place an Input File ISO onto an Output File device block with no issues. But the thing wouldn’t boot.

In the end, I ended up creating a bootable USB of System Rescue. I was hoping to avoid doing something like this, because Memtest86+ is only 1.8MB, versus several hundred megabytes for a Linux ISO.

But, in the end, who cares. It booted in BIOS mode just fine.

One thing to note - Memtest86 is a proprietary software, while Memtest86+ is a GPL program. But Memtest86+ will only boot in Legacy/BIOS mode. I didn’t find that to be a problem with my inexpensive motherboard, as it supports both Legacy and UEFI boot modes.