Segmentation Fault during boot up.

From: David Pollard (headly81_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 12/01/03 

Date: 30 Nov 2003 16:55:11 -0800

Hi There,
I'm running Redhat 7.3 and it has been very happy for quite some time.
Hardware is a Dell PIII 700 Mhz with 512 Mb RAM

In the past few weeks I have been getting segmentation faults normally
when I try to remove a file with the rm -f command or when the system
tried to do it from script so this makes a mess of the boot process.

I couldn't fix the problem so I decided to reinstall from scratch on a
new hard drive then restore from my backup. After a few attempts and
a bit of fun getting my tar command correct it all worked and things
were happy again. This lasted for a week or two and then the
segmentation faults started coming back again. I would get messages
in the system mail box that showed rm -f failures during cron jobs. I
thought that I may have restored a corrupted command when I did my
restore from tape. (doesn't explain why is was ok for a week or two).
So I went through the process again this time not restoring the
directory that has the rm command in it (/bin I think).

Again things went well and my system was fine for about a week. then I
started getting segmentation faults again. This time the ls command
also fails with Segmentation Fault (core dumped).

I'm thinking could be hardware. I have another identical machine that
I can use to swap parts out. I receive the error messages during the
boot process so I doubt if it is heat related. I just use Cntrl Alt
Del to shut down each time between reboots. I also noticed that this
time the ls command Segments as well. It didn't do this on the
previous two failures.

None of the following helped but I'll list them here just so you know
what I have tried.

First I removed one of my two memory modules
Then the other (put the first one back in)
Then I took them both out and put different ones in.
Took out all interface cards except video.
Took out the AGP video card and put in an old PCI one.
Swapped out the mother board.

I swapped out the boot drive during a previous reinstall. So the only
original hardware is the second hard disk the CD drive, the floppy
drive and the case.

This is starting to not look like a hardware problem again.

Has anyone got any ideas why my machine goes ok for a week or two then
starts doing this? I'm really stumped now.

Thanks in advance

David.

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