Unexplained Segmentation Faults

[James Colannino]

Hey everyone.  I've had some problems with an old machine of mine for a 
while.  I have a P200 MMX running Slackware 8.1 that's worked very well 
so far.  The BIOS is able to recognize all 13GB of my HD which I've 
found to be quite rare with such an old machine, and it seemed for a 
while to be pretty stable.

However, everytime I try to run "updatedb" so that I can locate files, 
it works for a few minutes and then always without fail will give me a 
segmentation fault.  Then, if I've attempted that command, everytime I 
halt or restart the system, it'll give me a segmentation fault as it's 
unmounting all remote filesystems (I don't actually have any -- I'm 
planning on removing all references to nfs from the system.)  If I 
haven't tried to updatedb, it halts and restarts without any problems.

After I've gotten one segmentation fault from running the command 
"updatedb," from now on, until I reboot the system, it doesn't even work 
the Hard Drive at all before I get the same error, this time saying 
something about a NULL Pointer.

This is really frustrating me.  I'm pretty sure from other observations 
I've made that excessive writing (and/or reading -- not sure) to the 
disk is what's producing these errors.

Now for my question.  Do you think maybe the processor is bad, or do you 
think maybe there's something wrong with the IDE controllers?  This is 
kind of an odd problem.  I'm certain that the disk is good.  I've had 
very good luck with it thus far (of course I'll probably plunk it in 
another system and give it a good diagnostical checkup to make sure.)  I 
tried running the processor at 166 Mhz as opposed to 200 Mhz in a vain 
attempt to see if maybe for some reason the CPU was overheating, but 
that I see is most likely not the problem.  I did over clock it once to 
233 Mhz, and had the segmentation faults start occuring (this was before 
I'd used the system pretty much at all though,) so I originally thought 
that maybe I over heated the CPU and thus set it back to 200.  It seemed 
to work alright, but it's still producing these errors (only when I use 
the disk a great deal though.)  Very strange.  Any ideas?

James
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