Multiple computer seg faults on hard drive access

LRdM · n00b Joined: 19 Jul 2003 Posts: 27

I've tried installing Gentoo 1.4_rc4 on a total of four machines:
My Toshiba 233mhz 2515 CDS laptop, which installed sucessfully and has been running fine and re-emerged both system and world after some flag changes without problem, my pentium 200 mhz MMX, my pentium 900 mhz celeron, and my AMD 1.33Ghz Athlon; the last three all being unsucessful after multiple attempts due to seg faults during seemingly random hard drive accesses. On all three computers, there has been at least one seg fault prior to the stage tarball unpacking phase, ruling out the compilation-stress reason for Gentoo segmentation faults. While persistance let's me slowly progress into various stages, eventually there's a point where segmentation faults are unavoidable, usually during emerge world. The segmentation faults occur most frequently during fdisks, filesystem formats, and drive mounting. I could understand, while very frustrating, possible hardware to be blamed on the 200 mhz machine, the 200, 900 and 1.33 have run other flavors of linux fine, all pass multiple passes of memtest, and have had zeros written to their hard drives after the first failed install attempts. I've tried using both reiserfs and ext3 as the filesystems but seg faults still occur. While the 200 mhz is a little old, the 900mhz and 1.33ghz are all within the last 3 years and their hard drives have no known physical defects and have passed any test I could put them through. Is there a possibility I might have a problem with my CD of 1.4_rc4 or am I just very unlucky?

Petyr · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 8:06 am Post subject:

One thing you might want to look at is what hdparm's are set when you boot one of the newer machines.
hdparm /dev/hda
maybe try turning off some of the flags (if you see IRQ Unmasking turned on, I'd say turn that one off first, then DMA, then 32-bit IO)
Other than that I'm not sure what else could really be causing that since the rest of the hardware sounds like it's probably alright.

Petyr

linux_weenie · Guru Joined: 25 Jun 2003 Posts: 365

you should probably check your memory. segmentation faults are random because you don't know when you are writing to the bad sectors of memory. try the memtest86 image on the liveCD and see if your memory is doing okay (maybe you got a bad batch?). or you can go to their website and download the bootable CD image at http://www.memtest86.com. hope that helps.

-Will

GentooBox · Veteran Joined: 22 Jun 2003 Posts: 1168 Location: Denmark

Can you post the segfaults ?

try lower your DMA settings by:

LRdM · n00b Joined: 19 Jul 2003 Posts: 27

All of the HDs ran initially with IRQ Unmasking and 32-bit IO off and I've tried with both DMA on and off and still getting segfaults. Also:

xlinty · n00b Joined: 24 Jul 2003 Posts: 2

I have the same problem with my Acer Notebook (a celeron) and with my office computer (an Pentium 4). Same problem also with vmware on both the computers. Perhaps is a Kernel Problem ????

Bye :cry:

LRdM · n00b Joined: 19 Jul 2003 Posts: 27

I noticed that the installer runs 2.4.20 , yet it has modules for both 2.4.20 and 2.4.21 kernels. My next resort might be installing Gentoo from within another distribution, but hopefully the next Gentoo installer version will use a new kernel if that is the case.

xlinty · n00b Joined: 24 Jul 2003 Posts: 2

I have succesfully installed gentoo from a Slackware boot + root CD.
I have also made my kernel from gentoo-sources. It works !

Please rebuild Gentoo Live CD !

Bye