operating-systemhardware

Is there anyway to disable a region of RAM for use?


Lately I have been experiencing general crashed as freezes, so I ran a MemTest86, which failed. Seems like there are a small portion of RAM that have faulty bits, which are likely the cause.

Is there some way to disable this region of memory either in BIOS or in the OS (Win10, currently)?


Solution

  • The firmware might technically support something to exclude faulty RAM; but if it does it's not working.

    I don't think Windows supports anything to exclude faulty RAM.

    Linux does supports this; if and only if the memory isn't used before the kernel sets up its memory management. The problem would be installing an OS when the installer will probably use the faulty memory.

    If you can get Linux to work, then you can install Windows inside a virtual machine running on Linux. Of course then there's still no way to determine how long it's going to last before more RAM becomes faulty.

    Mostly; the easiest and safest option is to replace the faulty RAM.