[gentoo-user] Installation problems on AMD64 box

[R C Mitchell]

I use Ubuntu for every day but as my box has a spare 40GB hard disk I decided 
to have a go at installing Gentoo on it for evaluation

Using the handbook documentation for AMD64 I burned a basic installation CD, 
booted it up, and followed the instructions for installation on the spare 
drive.  Everything went fine; I partitioned the disk with a 32MB ext2 sector 
for /boot, a 512MB swap sector, 10GB for root and the rest for /home.  I had 
no trouble with the network, successfully downloaded everything that needed 
to be downloaded and unpacked it, successfully chrooted to the new system, 
and reached the compiling the kernel section without a glitch.

And the then the trouble began.  I emerged gentoo-sources, and it ran fine for 
about five minutes, and then (choosing the moment when I decided all was well 
to go and make a pot of tea, the system rebooted itself.  I booted up the 
disk again and went through the chrooting process.  When I went to emerge 
gentoo-sources again, emerge looked for the dependencies and then the whole 
system froze solid with one of those "this is NOT our fault" kernel panic 
messages.

Not to worry.  I can be very patient on occasions.  I cold booted the box and 
started all over again, deleting the new partitions and going through the 
instructions from the beginning incase I'd missed anything.  Again I got to 
emerging gentoo-sources.  Again it ran for about five minutes before the 
system rebooted itself.  Again I went through the chrooting process and went 
to emerge gentoo-sources.  Again the system froze.  I rebooted and rechrooted 
and tried it again.  Same result.

I'm reluctant to believe that this is down to an arbitrary hardware fault, 
since everything else works fine.  It does seem to have something to do with 
emerging gentoo-sources.

Is anybody able to rescue this maiden in distress and throw some light on my 
problem?

Rosie