New PC won't boot into Memtest

D3szaras · August 4, 2023

Hey everyone,

I build a new PC (Parts list) and wanted to test it thorough.

So far passed Cinebench, 3DMark and lastly I wanted to do a Memtest. But it just doesn't want to boot onto the USB drive.

First I tried it with boot order, it always booted into Windows instead the drive, even managed to cause two different BSoDs after some restarts, irql_not_less_or_equal and attempted_write_toreadonly_memory.

I had to reset the CMOS to be able to boot again into Windows.

When trying it with the boot menu, it shows the drive and when I pick it, it fades a split second into black and kicks me back in the boot menu. After a while keyboard and mouse freeze.

When set to default in BIOS, so no Auto-Overclock or AMD Expo, it still doesn't want to boot Memtest, but the freezes and BSoDs don't happen.

I also tried some BIOS settings that I've seen suggested with google, like setting legacy mode, switching away from UEFI, but none of these worked.

Lastly I tested the drive on my old PC, there it doesn't detect it at all on boot, and my Laptop, where it works perfectly fine and I let it even do one test pass on there.

I really don't know what to make out of all of this. So my hope someone can tell me what the freak is going on. This whole thing feels like haunted

RONOTHAN## · August 4, 2023

So just to make sure, the tags are referring to memtest64, though as far as I'm aware that test is run inside Windows, with memtest86 being the one you boot into directly. Which test are you trying to use specifically?

As for what to make of it, assuming you are running the right test I'd probably just give up on it, in my experience it rarely catches issues that one of the in-Windows stress tests can't pick up on, and I've had it before where MemTest86 passed four loops easily (~2 hours), yet one of the in-Windows tests would fail within 10 minutes.

D3szaras · August 4, 2023

It's memtest86, I picked the wrong tag, apologies for that.
I suppose if there's nothing much that can be done. I did run the PC with all overclocking settings on and played few games, it didn't show in Windows any issues as of now.