Thoughts on Memtest86 errors with no OS installed?

[davenippon]

Hello and almost Happy New Year!

 

I have inherited a MSI GT70 Dominator Pro 890 from my brother who tried using it in his construction business to run his 3D architectural software. It came with Win 7 and he tried to update to Win 8 but ran into some kind of trouble, got frustrated and ended up formatting the hard drives (see specs below, 1 HDD and 3 SSDs).I know it is pretty old, but I want to get it running. I have a brand new, legal copy of Windows 10 Pro 64-bit I want to install, but it keeps failing no matter what I try, so right now, the machine has no OS. Originally the laptop was set up in RAID with the 3 SSDs combined as RAID 0 (MSI was calling it "Super Raid") so I set that back up since my brother deleted all the partitions etc. but still no luck after trying to install from USB as well as ISO on a DVD. ANYWAY - I found info about Memtest86 here on this site and created the USB stick, booted from it and let it run automatically without changing anything. It aborted due to high number of errors (screen showed 10,893 errors the second time I tried. I didn't record the first time). The errors are showing up in Test 3 and all that I can see show "Test: 3 Addr: bunch of characters Expected: 00000000 Actual: 00000100 CPU: 4" and at the top says CPUs Found: 8, CPUs Active: 4 (it's got 8 threads on 4 cores).
The laptop's CPU was running about 95

[Gremlin]

You can reseat the memory if it helps. Most likely it might be bad memory? Can you try using one memory at a time? 

[dr_bowtie]

I wouldnt even attempt to install the OS until Memtest passes. It will be easier on the controller to use only 2 sticks of memory Unless it is Quad Channel....which some are.

 

As for the raid, I dont think I'd run a Raid 0 on a work PC unless it has some kind of rebuildable redundancy if it fails. Ram issues are one of the biggest causes of raid failures other than drives themselves...

 

Use Parted Magic to "Erase" wipe the SSD drives to bring them back to like new and then test them individually to make sure the raid will be stable. Then again for a work PC I'd use a different raid that allows speed and reliability...I think it is Raid 5 and links two of the drives and uses the 3rd for redundancy.... that way if the raid set fails you run off the redundant drive.... you dont lose everything. rebuild the raid and carry over from the redundant.

[wevsspot]

As mentioned previously, remove and re-seat memory modules.

Then reset the BIOS to factory defaults.

Clean out the insides of the laptop best your can including the cpu fan assembly and gpu cooler assembly.

If you continue to get Memtest errors (and if you have more than one memory module, test each module individually and see if just one of them is faulty and causing the errors.

 

I also agree with the others on RAID 0 on SSD drives, especially a laptop.  Ditch that idea and install a single 480-512Gb SSD drive after you've cleared up the memory errors.