Stage 1 Segfault Tale of Woe

[franco1701]

Hi, I am not sure if this should be here, but my tale may help those who have a segfault while bootstraping.

I have been trying to install Gentoo 2004.0 for months from stage 1 on a Compaq with 384MB of ram and an Athlon (not Athlon XP) 1 GHz processor. I have had it installed in the past, but I fell in love with a wonderful woman who uses Winblows XP and I needed it on my machine to fix her computer remotely(in an easy manner).

So once I was doen with that M$ crap, I tried to install gentoo again but this time with 512MB of memory (I added the original 128MB module that I got with the system from the factory, which I removed to use in a P3 server box that I salvaged off the scrap heap before returning to college). However every time bootstrap-2.6.sh reached the compilation of GCC, I would get a segmentation fault and it would be on a random file. So I am like WTF yo .This was odd and I never encountered this before. I checked these forums and asked friends, and they all said it was hardware related, either the CPU is bad or the memory. I ran memtest86 off the SuSE 8.2 DVD and every thing was fine. I tried again, failed again, and I gave up and said good bye to the distro that I love .

It wasn't until recently that I said to myself, maybe it is the memory and memtest86 is not telling me everything. So yesterday I took my live CD out again and I opened my case. I took the Compaq 128MB module out, I downloaded the portage tree and all the packages over State University of NY College at Potsdam's crapy resnet network from Clarkson University (Which is only across town BTW) at a painful average of 5 Kb/s . In my doubtful atitude I awoke the next morning with a beautiful, bootsraped gentoo system ready for "emerge system".

I am proud to say as of this writing my system is in the final stages of instalation, awaiting the install of Grub, a cron package and a sys-log package .

So the morals of the story:
1. Don't remove gentoo from your system once you got it. It is a beautiful, up to date, and one of the most robust distributions of linux that you will ever find IMHO.
2. If you get a segmentation fault, try swaping out one of your memory modules if you have more than one before you give up. It worked for me and it may work for you. After all, better a cheap stick of RAM than an expensive (compared to RAM) CPU.

I hope you enjoyed my tale of woe and that it will help those with segfault problems.

[Rainmaker]

This is a beautiful story, and you're absolutely right. People shouldn't immediatly think their hardware is 100% ok, "because windows runs fine"

[vman]

You've given me a direction. Mine has been segfaulting on gettext from the bootstrap.sh script - tho I had it segfault on other emerges too trying to test different cflags to track the problem down. I ran memtest with no problems. I had mprime of gimps segfault on me, and am re-running it again just to be sure that wasn't a fluke. The stage1 install from the same cdr ran fine on my other system, so I'm thinking hardware now. Am hoping it's not cpu - it's an older system and I don't want to spend money replacing the cpu. It does have 384mb of ram, so I can do without a stick or two if that's the problem... It's been a very perplexing few days and I think I've probably scoured most of this forum hunting for similar situations - this one is as close as it gets.

Cheers,
Mike