In an effort to try and cut down the manual labour in burning in new hardware, we have been working with RIP linux on a USB key.  The idea is to fully automate a read and write to all drives in the system, and then automatically run memtest.  This way we can just plug the USB key into the system, start the script and it will perform and record the burn in tests to the USB key which we can review after a few days (burn in tests can take up to a few days  depending on the hardware!).

To do this we needed to modify the boot menu on the RIPLinux USB key, and set memtest to start automatically after 10 seconds of no input.    This can be done by doing the following:

Under:
LABEL Boot Memory Tester!

Enter:
MENU DEFAULT

Under:
DEFAULT menu.c32

Enter:
TIMEOUT 100

A script can then placed to run automatically run when RIPLinux boots into the standard kernel.  The script will complete the hard drive tests, then it will reboot the server automatically and the memtest will run.