lolwut

I ran memtest86+ on my *nix box and now I can't access one of the partitions on its main hard drive, although I'm not sure if they could be related or not. I get the error message "Could not access (filepath): access was denied". Even when logged in as root I can't access it... Halp plox?

>>21
Actually he seems to understand perfectly. Memory testing tools read and write a shitload of specific patterns all over your RAM in hope of finding the exact pattern at exactly the right address so that your faulty RAM will trigger a crash and you can be sure your RAM is damaged.

In other words: Sometimes a crash because of faulty RAM only happens when a specific pattern is written/read to/from a specific address. Or when a certain range of memory is heavily accessed. Or a combination of both. And so on. There is no way a RAM testing tool could simulate all the unique patterns of memory access that may happen during normal operation.

In other words, even if you leave memtest running for days, if it finds no error, you can never be 100% sure that your RAM is OK. Only the opposite is true; if it finds an error or your system crashes, you can be fairly sure that your RAM is faulty.

tl;dr; get a brain, moran.