Recovering Data from Laptop with (Likely) Broken RAM

[segfault]

Hello! I believe I have broken my laptop RAM, and I'd like to confirm my diagnosis and to hear any recommendations for getting my files off of the hard drive, like if there's something I can run from a flash drive.

I recently ran a heavy workload Python script on a Surface running a Debian-based distro overnight, thinking it would just take a while. When I woke up, the laptop didn't seem to be too much hotter than normal, but my browser started closing, then the desktop environment began crashing to the lock screen, and finally the whole thing froze and I was forced to force power it off.
Afterwards it would error during startup, send me to BosyBox/initramfs without allowing any keyboards to work, or kick me off the DE once I logged in, and I usually had to force shutdown again. Accessing via a tty would last longer at first, but I would see phantom messages about a "nul" byte being interpreted until it also crashed. I think booting into recovery mode from GRUB also got me a few more short logins. It said at first that it couldn't load the filesystem, so I tried to run fsck from a flash drive. I tried booting a couple distros off of flash drives new and old, though, and they almost always froze on the logo or sent me to initramfs again. Tails at one point displayed whatever text I typed in one spot on the load screen.
I also keep a Windows partition, which seemed to work better at first. As I got more desperate, when my Linux partition kept erroring, I tried to actually use Windows and found it was slowed down but usable. Then, after a while, it began to send me back to its lock screen or reboot.

It seems the hardware is damaged, since every OS I try fails. I managed to run memtest86+ from one of the distros' boot menus, which reported a ton of failed tests coming back with an incorrect 1 at the same bit. If I understand it correctly, this most likely means a large section of the RAM is broken. This would explain how I got many different errors over the process of testing, including the desktop environment breaking, losing my GUI, lightdm and various other servers failing on startup, failing to load the file system and getting booted to an unusable initramfs, every OS failing, and most consistently a plethora of segfaults.

My biggest concern is getting my data off, as I still don't have a proper backup system yet. Despite it being an older, less accessible model, I could try to swap out the RAM or SSD, but if possible I'd like to run something small that can adapt to this RAM issue and use the small amount of RAM provided. Even better would be to configure something in the BIOS or GRUB to make my main OS temporarily usable (e.g. set it to start off of swap), but this seems unlikely.

 

[ramussons]

Is your RAM hard wired? If yes, then I'm afraid you'll not be able to do run any OS safely to copy the HDD to an external source.
But if the RAM is pluggable, you can try to run a small Linux OS with only 1 bank plugged in. You may have to try with bank / slot combinations to (hopefully) get a combination that allows a small Linux OS to run dependably.
Unless the HDD is hardwired, you have the option to remove it and put it in another PC for copying.

 

[Brickwizard]

When I woke up, the laptop didn't seem to be too much hotter than normal, but my browser started closing,

That is not a normal response for damaged Ram, the normal response is nothing as the OS cannot boot without it,
it is a sign of overheating, if its a laptop, make sure all the air grills are clean, if you can open it check the CPU [if it has a loose heat sink, then remove, clean and reinstall with thermal paste]
if desktop then give it a good service and clean especially the PSU and anything with heat sinks.

 

[segfault]

Update: I managed to run initramfs (with a working keyboard) for bit while fiddling around with these instructions, but I can't figure out how I did it. As with the bootable images, it did crash eventually, but I had a bit more time beforehand. I also got the Arch console and the EFI shell that came with it to boot from a USB stick, but the Arch OS crashes and the EFI shell doesn't seem to be able to mount my other filesystems.

Is your RAM hard wired? If yes, then I'm afraid you'll not be able to do run any OS safely to copy the HDD to an external source.
But if the RAM is pluggable, you can try to run a small Linux OS with only 1 bank plugged in. You may have to try with bank / slot combinations to (hopefully) get a combination that allows a small Linux OS to run dependably.
Unless the HDD is hardwired, you have the option to remove it and put it in another PC for copying.

Oh, it looks like it is soldered on. Is there a way to control what RAM is used by software (maybe GRUB or something since that appears to run fine), or does this need to be done physically?

That is not a normal response for damaged Ram, the normal response is nothing as the OS cannot boot without it,
it is a sign of overheating, if its a laptop, make sure all the air grills are clean, if you can open it check the CPU [if it has a loose heat sink, then remove, clean and reinstall with thermal paste]
if desktop then give it a good service and clean especially the PSU and anything with heat sinks.

This is happening consistently on startup since then, rather than under high workloads. I believe the memtest indicates that a large section of the RAM is damaged, so I assume that when it works it just hasn't used that part yet.

If anyone can recommend a way to run a really small kernel to just copy files, like booting directly into initramfs, adding cp to the GRUB console, or maybe actually running the cp command as binary that seems like it should be possible.

(What's the point of letting me put links in if every time I do I'm told it looks like botting??)

 

[Brickwizard]

If you're comfortable in installing any aps and drivers you need then Tiny Core is one of the smallest usable distributions, Puppy is small, but as it runs wholly in RAM it would not be suitable, if you have access to another machine and a 16gb pen-drive [or larger] my suggestion would be to create a pen-drive with persistence using Lubuntu [this can work on as low as 500mb of ram
you may get more help if you use your distribution forum, or linux.org where there are a predominance of Linux users

addendum.. if your distribution is Kali, then expect some grief, as you are expected to have enough knowledge of Linux to sort your own problems.

 

[segfault]

I had trouble getting it to boot from Tiny Core, but I managed a minimal arch boot after reinstalling the iso. I didn't have binaries to fsck the filesystem and mount was failing for some reason, so I ended up just using cp to copy an entire partition from /dev to a big external drive that I could mount successfully. From there I can connect that drive to another computer and mount it to access the filesystem.

Since it seems like damaged RAM is still the main candidate, and the RAM is soldered to the board, and there doesn't seem to be a way to only allocate part of it, it looks like getting the data off the hard drive is as much as I can do.
Thank you for your suggestions.

 

[Brickwizard]

it looks like getting the data off the hard drive is as much as I can do.

That is probably the most important thing, If you are replacing the machine, then avoid Chromebooks and other entry level machines as generally speaking they are not usually very user-friendly when it comes to repairs or upgrades, Personally I would always rather go for a re-used Dell or Lenovo of 3-5 years old than a new Chromebook