Stage1 Install - Stuck with Segfaults - [SOLVED sortof]

Remillard · Last edited by Remillard on Thu Feb 12, 2004 6:30 pm; edited 1 time in total

Howdy folks,

Well I'm in the midst of trying a few different things but I'm now officially stuck.

I have the Pentium 4 LiveCD. I DID check the md5sum, so I'm assuming it's correct. I also have Knoppix 3.3.

Installation History:
Attempt #1: Got /dev/hda partitioned for / (reiserfs), /boot (ext3), /home (reiserfs), /media (reiserfs). Last two aren't mounted. stage1 tarball extraction fails, tar segfaults or EOF's. Can't remember precisely.

Attempt #2: Started with Knoppix. Mounted /mnt/gentoo/ and /mnt/gentoo/boot. Got stage1 from website. Extracted successfully. emerge sync freezes entire system after first site can't be reached.

Attempt #3: Reboot with Knoppix, put it in failsafe mode, start eth0. Everything okay. Put the SYNC server thing in make.conf. Make sure there is a SYNC_RETRY field listed. emerge sync now works fine. Attempt stage1 bootstrap. Segfaults at gettext.

Attempt #3.1: Restart bootstrap. Redoes portage. Redoes texinfo, and gettext, and then starts binutils. Segfaults during binutils.

Attempt #4: Reboot with Gentoo LiveCD again. Do the whole mounting, chrooting and miscellaneous. Try bootstrap again. Segfaults. Error (roughly)

Remillard · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 4:59 pm Post subject:

I remembered this morning that at one point, Knoppix had a segfault during boot as well. Though I tried again with failsafe and had no problems.

This must be a sticky one though. The Gentoo community usually has some idea about all sorts of these install issues

.

Remi
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Panther_7 · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 46 Location: FL

Doesn't pentium4 in GCC produce some kind of incorrect code? I think somewhere in the make.conf or make.conf.sample it says that the pentium4 option is bugged. They say to compile with pentium3 instead. Hope that helps. :wink:

pixie · Guru Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 305

-march=pentium4 is fixed now I think. I believe it was only early releases of GCC3.2 that had a problem.

Remillard · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 7:50 pm Post subject:

Thanks, I'll keep that in my hip pocket. It's possible that the issue is mounting with bind (see the Argh!! ... Hardware? post nearby). If I can't get that to work consistently, I'll try shifting down to -march=pentium3 (can't hurt!).
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pixie · Guru Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 305

You may want to test your memory. The problems seem very random.

Remillard · Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 9:01 pm Post subject:

Do you have any suggestions for a program to do this with? I wouldn't mind finding something that can thrash the processor, memory, and harddrive a bit, a hardstyle burn-in.
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pixie · Guru Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 305

There should be an option to boot into memtest86 or whatever it's called on the live cd.

never done one myself though. but then I've never had symtomps of dodgy memory sticks since I started using Linux a few years back.

Remillard · Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2004 6:30 pm Post subject:

Success!! (sort of)

The memtest kernel option is fantastic. I ran that and within about 10-15 I got the bad news that I had a bad stick of memory. I let it run overnight and it just kept racking them up on a particular test.

The cool thing is that this is on the Gentoo LiveCD. Just about everything you need is really on that CD! While I'm not thrilled that there was a memory error (because it slows down my install to wait for the overnight reship) I'm VERY glad I was able to find it.

And I have to admit the http://www.xtechnology.com/ folks were really cool about it. Actually they used the memtest-86 program so there was no issue about having to do retesting or further benchmarking. I think they're still mostly a MS house, but it was refreshing not to have to deal with the dreaded "let's-go-down-the-checklist" type of technical support.

Well here's hoping tomorrow evening goes far better than things have gone so far

.

Regards,
Remillard
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irf2003 · Veteran Joined: 10 Sep 2003 Posts: 1078

watch your CFLAGS, tone them down.
I build about 2 to 3 gentoo boxens a week, and my
findings as far as PIV boxes are concerned, is that the following
compiler flags seem to be the safest and most high yield in terms of perfrmance gains

michaelb · Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2004 9:25 pm Post subject:

So far as I understand GCC flags, having both an -march as well as an -mcpu set will end up doing the same thing as just the -mcpu.
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irf2003 · Veteran Joined: 10 Sep 2003 Posts: 1078