Booting Memtest

To be able to boot memtest, there are a couple requirements:

• The memtest iso
• The memdisk kernel from the syslinux library
  • Syslinux 6.xx versions display issues trying to boot memtest
  • Syslinux 5.10 has been tested working

Note: Try to not get confused between memtest and memdisk. Memtest is the program (a RAM diagnostic utility) we want to boot, while memdisk is the kernel that we are going to use to boot memtest.

Note: This guide will assume usage of HTTP for server side providing of boot resources.

Download the latest version of the memtest iso. Extract the archive using your compression software of choice. You will be left with an iso file. Save this iso file to your server.

Download version 5.10 of the syslinux package. Extract the archive using your compression software of choice. The memdisk file is found as memdisk\memdisk relative to the directory in which you extracted the archive. It is the file with no extension. You can either save the entire extracted archive to your server, or just this single memdisk file. The convention of this guide will be to copy the entire archive, for ease of understanding.

For the boot to occur the following items must be supplied:

• Memdisk
• Memdisk options
• Memtest iso

  #!ipxe
  
  set protocol http
  set server_ip 192.168.100.1
  set memtest_iso memtest86+-5.01.iso
  
  kernel ${protocol}://${server_ip}/syslinux-5.10/memdisk/memdisk || read void
  initrd ${protocol}://${server_ip}/${memtest_iso} || read void
  imgargs memdisk iso raw || read void
  boot || read void

Observe the imgargs line:

  imgargs memdisk iso raw || read void

This line means that we are passing the memdisk kernel two options, iso and raw.

• iso specifies that we are passing memdisk a bootable iso file.
• raw specifies that we want the operating system we are loading to have full access to as much RAM on the system as possible.