I used to have a desktop which gives weird init and kernel panics upon bootups.

I quickly download and run SLAX on that system; SLAX won't even load on that system due to kernel panics.

I swopped the RAMS and everything worked fine. I've sent the ram for RMA and the verdict that it's faulty.

So I was thinking: SLAX helps to detect bad rams since it runs off the memory.

Am i right? Or was it just plain bad luck that SLAX dont run properly in the first place.

Linux always seems to fall over quickly with bad ram, unlike Windows which seems to be able to wait until it can damage its registry

Just once though a bad ram stick managed to trash a Slackware box reiserfs

perhaps slax managed to use memory spaces that weren't used by your regular distro during boot-up... this would especially be probable if you booted slax in the "run from ramdisk" (or whatever it's called) mode, as normally it would mainly run from the cd-rom...

either way, using slax to detect bad memory is not a good idea... it's better to use a tool designed specially for that task... like memtest86+, for example: http://www.memtest.org/

i've seen several linux live cds that come with a boot-time option of running a memtest, but i'm not sure about slax... then again the memtest people do provide bootable ISOs so it's really easy to test your RAM...

just my ...

Slax has an option to do a memtest86 test which checks your RAM. Press F1 before it starts to load and there should be an option for it.