Unexplained Segmentation Faults

[James Colannino]

I solved the problem :)  Apparently, the CD-ROM was bad.  I don't know 
why it made a difference on the system just by being connected because 
it wasn't being used except once to install Slackware 8.1.  But 
nevertheless, it's working ok now.  I guess I'll just have to replace 
the CD-ROM.  Thank God the CD-ROM was the first thing I tried.  I really 
hate having to test devices one by one in order to find problems.

James

Brian Kelsay wrote:
> Like Chris said, check to see that the /var is not full.  If you have a
> hardware failure it is more likely to be in the chipset on the motherboard.
> I think it is the North Bridge that contains the hard drive controller.
> Put another drive in the system with a fresh OS load.  Any OS.   And see if
> you get write errors still.
> I had this problem with a users' Pentium 4 PC (6 months old) running Windows
> XP.  I replaced the drive and ghosted a fresh image to the PC.  On first
> reboot after ghost I got a blue screen of Death with kernel errors.   I
> tried to load from CD to eleminate the networking element and got the same
> result.   I replaced the motherboard and it was doing the same thing.  Safe
> mode didn't help, but did point out that the last driver loaded was a module
> for the AGP set.   So next I replaced the motherboard again and also the
> video card.   I should have replaced one thing at a time to prove which it
> was, but I was in a hurry and had the parts from the OEM so one of the two
> things fixed it.
> You can also remove all cards, but the video and unplug CD and floppy and
> any non-essential devices, add one thing at a time until the problem
> reappears.   This method can help with any hardware troubleshooting.
> Hope it helps.
> Brian
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "James Colannino" <email2jamez at covad.net>
> 
> 
> 
>>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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