I can't back up my Windows 7 Home Premium

Night Hawk · 23 Jul 2012

The usual method for finding out which module is bad news is to run memtest or another memory stress tester with only one dimm present at a time. The bad dimm will be flagged right away when the initial run provided the system posts normallly will see a number of errors.

A slight flaw however might take longer to discover and why many suggest leaving memtest running for a few hours to repeat each test over and over in order to reveal the one needing replacement. If no errors come up at all despite a good lengthy run then you are back to drive for hardware or drive errors as well as an OS problem.

This is why looking over the memory dump files as well as any other error logs as well as taking notes on the error codes seen on any BSOD are the most valuable for discovering where the actual problems are. Once you know the cause(s) then you can work on the solution(s).

F5ing · 23 Jul 2012

Night Hawk said:

The usual method for finding out which module is bad news is to run memtest or another memory stress tester with only one dimm present at a time. The bad dimm will be flagged right away when the initial run provided the system posts normallly will see a number of errors.

A slight flaw however might take longer to discover and why many suggest leaving memtest running for a few hours to repeat each test over and over in order to reveal the one needing replacement. If no errors come up at all despite a good lengthy run then you are back to drive for hardware or drive errors as well as an OS problem.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. If the error shows up on first run and you can identify the stick/slot (based on the report and what you know about how the board accesses the memory) then you don't have to go through sticks/slots one at a time. All it takes is another single pass to confirm the bad stick (when placed in a different slot). Then remove it and do the final run for 7 or more passes to make sure there are no errors. Done!