emerge system error

[welcome3]

Hi all!

quick recap. Two nights ago I started a Gentoo install, stage 1. The
bootstrap hadn't finished prior to my going to sleep. When I woke up, I
found I received an IOError. So yesterday, with nothing better to do than
watch the Leafs get pummeled (sp?) by the Devils, I decided to start from
scratch. Complete new reboot, delete the partitions, etc.

I'm running a P4 1.6 Ghz Gigabyte motherboard with 512 MB RDRAM. The hard
drive is the second HD in my system (first is Windows XP Pro), a 60 GB
Maxtor (probably 7200 rpm). And I have a Sympatico ADSL connection (High
speed, not Ultra high speed for anybody who knows). I have not overclocked
the chipset.

I partitioned:
hdb1 100M ext3,
hdb2 1024M swap
hdb3 the rest reiserfs

Good news is that it made it through the bootstrap in about 3 hours (6:30
pm - 9:30). The mirror site that was being used was OregonState.

So I started the next step in the instructions, and got to the "emerge
system" step. And I let it run. When I woke up this morning this error was
on my screen (about last 20 lines). Please excuse typos, this is a screen
to paper to screen process.
--------------------------
emerge system
......
<<< obj /usr/lib/libopcodes-2.13.90.0.18.so
--- !mtime obj /usr/lib/libiberty.a
--- !mtime obj /usr/lib/libbfd.la
--- !mtime obj /usr/lib/libbfd.a
hdb: dma-intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: dma-intr: status=0x40 { UncorrectableError } LBAsect=2320860, sector
103872
end_request: I/O error, dev 3:43 (hdb), sector 103872
Traceback (most recent call last):
FILE "/usr/bin/emerge", line 1603 in unmerge
retval=portage.unmerge(mysplit[0], mysplit[1], portage.root,
unmerge_action not in ["clean","prune"])
FILE "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/python.py" line 1960, in unmerge
mylink.unmerge(trimworld=mytrimworld)
FILE "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/python.py" line 4469, in unmerge
mymd5=perform_md5(obj, calc_prelink=1)
FILE "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/python.py" line 1951, in perform_md5
return perform_checksum(x,calc_prelink)[0]
FILE "/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/python.py" line 205, in
perform_checksum
return fchksum.fmd5t(filename)
IOError; [Errno 5] Input/output error: '/usr/lib/libbfd-2.13.90.0.18.so'
-------------------------------

It left me at the "cdimage portage #" prompt. An adsl-status run at this
point produced the following error:
bash adsl-status: command not found.

It seems to me the error is reporting bad sectors on the hard drive? I
could be wrong, of course. If so, please let me know.

So I have two questions. First, are there any tools that I can use to mark
bad sectors as unusable? Second, how do I start my adsl session again, and
then commence from the beginning of stage 2?

Any other comments/insights greatly appreciated.

cheers,
Matt.

[deepthought]

Turn of acpi and dma, and don't use hdparm. That might help. Unfortunately, there is no other way than starting from scratch.

Regards,
Alexander
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Registered Linux User #317705