installation nightmare - crash in bootstrap or emerge system

[darkphader]

Multiple attempts to install Gentoo 1.1a have met with failure. Either the system crashes/hangs during the bootstrap process or the emerge system process, not twice at the same place yet.
From what I can tell I'm following the installation intructions to the letter, yet I've been unsuccesful so far.
I've put the new rsync information in make.conf, uncommented the USE="" and changed it to read USE="-3dnow" as I have a P4 and 3dnow is AMD specific. Also uncommented the "march" flags.
The system is a P4 2.0A, 1GB of memory, ATI Radeon, 2 ATA drives, one CDRW, and one DVD-R. The system runs SuSE 7.3, 8.0, RedHat 7.3, Win2k and WinXP flawlessly.

[darkphader]

In case it helps troubleshoot all install attempts have been made on an available 20GB drive as hda with a simple partitioning scheme of a 100M /boot (ext2/3), a 2GB swap, and the rest of the drive / XFS.
I did attempt to use "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024" to erase the drives previous file system which fails from the Gentoo environment with an "Out of Memory" error followed by the shell crashing and then the console must be re-activated. This command does work fine on other distributions and the drive has been cleaned.
I'm just wondering if there's some issue with the amount of memory. I've tried to add some parameters at boot (mem=) but it appears nothing is allowed there.

[darkphader]

After reading the post "Install Bug Related to XFS/VM Pressure" I decided to try one more time without using the XFS file system. I used ReiserFS for / and all was fine, no lockups.

For some reason my eepro100 module isn't loading at boot but that's now another issue.