Installed Ubuntu with faulty RAM: do I need to reinstall?

Question

I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my Sony Viao vpceb3e1e. Everything works fine till I reach a certain amount of memory, then all the apps crash. I found out it was due to faulty RAM. I used Memtest86+ to figure out the problem and only 1 of my RAM sticks is broken. I'm now only using the non-broken one.

Since I installed Ubuntu with the faulty RAM to start off with (I'm 100% sure it was broken when I installed it since it was a recurring issue for 6 months), should I do a full reinstall?

Or, is there a way to check the consistency of my system to see if there have been errors written to the disk? and a fix?

Answer 1

I recommend a reinstall, or at least a full integrity check of installed files. It's quite possible that some of the files were corrupted during installation.

You can check the integrity of files that are provided by a package with the following command:

cd /
md5sum -c /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.md5sums | grep -v 'OK$'

If some packages turn out to contain corrupted files, you can reinstall them with sudo apt-get --reinstall install PACKAGENAME.

Beware that this only checks files that are directly provided by packages, not configuration files that were modified locally, binary files that were compiled locally, your own data, etc.