memtest86 very slow init

[herhor67]

I recently have some trouble with crashes, seems like two RAM sticks crash but each one separately works fine...

I wanted to do some tests, flashed the USB and booted it. However it seems to be very slow.

First there is empty black screen.
A minute passes. Getting hardware...
A minute passes. Getting CPUID info...
A minute passes. Getting cache...
A minute passes. Measuring speeds...
A minute passes. Getting MSR...
A minute passes. Getting memory size...
Like 10 minutes pass, nothing happens.

What is going on? I'm attaching the log.

[David (PassMark)]

We've seen this kind of thing before. In those cases the USB flash drive was bad and it was taking a very long time to write the log file.
So to start with can you try a different flash drive?

[herhor67]

Well, the pendrive has its years, so that's possible. Though it still worked kinda normally, the iso didn't take too long either, so it should be able to write some logs...
I will check with another one and get back to you.

[herhor67]

So I tested 3 flash drives in total.
The 1st one (described above) reported writing speeds around 2MB/s.
The 2nd one (similar age, though I used it recently as ubuntu installer so it shouldn't be too bad) reported speeds around 4MB/s and behaved similarly.
The 3rd one (almost new, max 1 year) reported speeds around 11MB/s. It also took a while to load, but finally managed to run and completed the test in somewhere above 3 hours (for 16GB RAM).

I feel like even 2MB/s is enough to write some logs, but well, who am I to judge.
Maybe I should've used USB ports directly on mobo instead of the front panel.

[David (PassMark)]

The best flash drives write at around 300MB/sec. (We've got one that does 2000MB/sec, however so 300 isn't the limit).
The worst do around 4MB/sec. But there might be a latency issue as well.
But yes, 11MB/sec should be fine.

If the system takes more than 30seconds to get into MemTest86, there is likely something else wrong.
These are all speeds measured in Windows of course. If your BIOS has some USB driver bug, or the port itself is bad then that would also explain it. And I don't think there is any other explanation that would explain your log. From the log it looks like the write speed is more around 0.001MB/sec.

For others looking at this post the motherboard was.
SMBIOS BIOS INFO Vendor: "American Megatrends Inc.", Version: "A.10", Release Date: "06/12/2019"
SMBIOS SYSTEM INFO Manufacturer: "Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.", Product: "MS-7C37", Version: "2.0"
2024-01-20 11:53:44 - SMBIOS BASEBOARD INFO Manufacturer: "Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.", Product: "MPG X570 GAMING PLUS (MS-7C37)", Version: "2.0", S/N: "J616215320"
2024-01-20 11:53:45 - EFI Specifications: 2.70