[Wlug] ULTRA1 Gentoo Install presents a problem

[ken jones]

Mike wrote:

"I fear you have just only gotten through the easy part!!"

  Mike's words rang true this morning.

While doing  "tar xvjf /mnt/gentoo/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C 
/mnt/gentoo/usr" the machine stopped dead.  This has happened twice. I 
fear that I do not have enough hard disk space, but I would hope for a 
gentler error message.  Here is Gentoo Install's last gasp while 
extracting the Portage snap shot.  I was connected to the Gentoo box via 
ssh.

------------snip from tar output---------
portage/eclass/tla.eclass
portage/eclass/perl-app.eclass
portage/eclass/gtk-engines.eclass
portage/eclass/perl-post.eclass
portage/eclass/rpm.eclass
portage/eclass/rox.eclass
portage/eclass/xfree.eclass
Read from remote host 192.168.1.110: No route to host
Connection to 192.168.1.110 closed.
[1]+  Done                    emacs /root/.ssh/known_hosts
[root at kjones-fedora .ssh]#    
--------end snip---------- 

At this point all terminals on the machine do not respond.
Is there a way that I can get back to this stage?  If I power cycle I 
get back to the livecd prompt and all my INSTALL work is lost - I 
think.  If [stop a] works I still must boot cdrom to get started again.  
Any ideas?

Here is the hard disk/partition setup.  They are not very big :'(
-----------snip from fdisk results----------
livecd gentoo # fdisk /dev/sda
Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda (Sun disk label): 16 heads, 135 sectors, 3880 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2160 * 512 bytes

   Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1             0       463    500040   83  Linux native
/dev/sda2  u        463       694    249480   82  Linux swap
/dev/sda3             0      3880   4190400    5  Whole disk
/dev/sda4           694      3880   3440880   83  Linux native

Command (m for help): q
livecd gentoo # fdisk /dev/sdb
Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb (Sun disk label): 19 heads, 80 sectors, 2733 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1520 * 512 bytes


   Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1             0       658    500080   83  Linux native
/dev/sdb2  u        658      2733   1577000   83  Linux native
/dev/sdb3             0      2733   2077080    5  Whole disk


Ken Jones