Memtest86 hangs on Boot from USB - Macbook 2014

[Tomas (Passmark)]

This particular fix didn't make it into the released version of v10.1 as it had already been submitted for secure boot signing to Microsoft at the time. It will be present in the next release v10.2 however.

[Pico]

Did this fix make it into Version 10.1 (Build 1000) that was released on Dec 16th, 2022? I don't see anything about it explicitly mentioned in the release notes: https://www.memtest86.com/whats-new.html

[David (PassMark)]

The fix will go into the main public release in a couple of weeks.

[MountainBee]

Thank you for the fix, I am now able to run tests on my Mid-2014 MacBook Pro!

[Jan]

I can confirm this build fixed the same problem on my Late 2013 iMac. Great!

[parejkoj]

Yes, the build you posted above worked, and I was able to run memtest. Thank you for the quick fix!

[Pico]

We've also seen hanging on a black screen when booting MemTest86 v10 on a variety of Mac models.

We've rolled our USBs back to v9.4 in the meantime, but I just tested this v10.1.0009 beta and it loaded and starting testing properly on at least a MacBook Air (13-inch, Mid 2012) which I saw previously hanging with v10.

Thanks for fixing this bug, looking forward to the next official release!

[keith]

Just an update, we found a bug that may affect the localization issue we are seeing.

Can you give this build a try:
https://www.passmark.com/temp/memtes...-10.1.0009.zip

[MountainBee]

Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for it!

[David (PassMark)]

We are thinking this is a bug in Apple's UEFI BIOS.
We are going to add a black list option to force English language only for this 2013/2014 Mac.
Might be a couple of weeks before anything is public.

EDIT: Ignore the above. It might in fact be a bug. See below.

[MountainBee]

Parejkoj, would you please explain which file from memtest.org you got to work?

[parejkoj]

Thanks for the followup. I was able to boot and test with the latest memtest86+ (from memtest.org), but if a version of memtest86 is able to work, I'd certainly try it, too.

I'm not entirely surprised that there are very few users of memtest86 on mac hardware, given Apple's recommendation just use Apple Diagnostics (which barely tests RAM at all) or use their techs for hardware questions.

[David (PassMark)]

Old versions of MemTest86 were English language / single byte ASCII text only. In V6 of MemTest86 (released in year 2015) we added French / German / Japanese / Chinese language.
So it is a bit strange that 7 years have past before someone noticed the Mac has a problem.

We should be able to blacklist this old Mac machine to work around the issue (i.e. force English language only).

[parejkoj]

I have exactly this problem on a 2013 Macbook pro. I don't see earlier versions of memtest86 available on the website other than v4: could I get access to post-v5 version to try?

[David (PassMark)]

Stopping on this line
[es-AR][193] Found skip block 2: 13
Isn't an issue we have seen before. It is just loading up the localised text at this point. So not really something that should have a problem.
This whole block of code is just a work-around for crappy old UEFI BIOS (thanks Apple) that doesn't support localization strings. This code doesn't get used on most machines.

Well have a look at the code around this point, but there is some chance it is a hardware failure.