Gaussian sometimes gives error messages, that merely transport the information that something went terribly wrong. Of course, there is practically no hint on what Gaussian was trying to do at this point.
On this page, I list the complete error messages and the corresponding solutions that worked for me in some cases.
Invalid CHK file
In case you get something along the lines of
Bad file opened by FileIO: Unit=2 I= 2 FPrev=40960 FCur= 0.
FileIO: IOper= 9 IFilNo(1)= 2 Len= 0 IPos= 0 Q= 135419884
dumping /fiocom/, unit = 1 NFiles = 1 SizExt = 524288 WInBlk = 512
defal = T LstWrd = 65536 FType=2 FMxFil=10000
Number 0
Base 20480
End 65536
End1 65536
Wr Pntr 20480
Rd Pntr 20480
Length 45056
Error termination in NtrErr:
NtrErr Called from FileIO.
Error: segmentation violation
eax 00000000, ebx 000017f1, ecx 0000000b
edx 00000029, esp ffec1404, ebp 0000000b
esi 00000000, edi 00000002
0 0x55573425
Segmentation fault
but other calculations with Gaussian are running smoothly, it may be due to an incompatible checkpoint (extension: chk) file. If you transfer data in this binary format between machines, this may fail silently. But there is a way how to do it in the manual: “Use formchk on the originating computer and unfchk on the target computer to create a binary checkpoint file.”
Need more memory
Error: segmentation violation, address not mapped to object eax 0000c350, ebx 0000186a, ecx 0000186a edx 29256944, esp ffcd7a48, ebp ffcd7a78 esi fffb49ec, edi 29256944 0 0x8080d38 1 0x804b53a 2 0x804a2f8 3 0x804a24d + 0x804a24d 4 0x555deca6 5 0x804a141 + 0x804a141 Aborted
Gaussian is trying to tell you that there is not enough memory available.
Send more disks
G2DrvN: will do 26 centers at a time, making 1 passes doing MaxLOS=2. Calling FoFCou, ICntrl= 3107 FMM=F I1Cent= 0 AccDes= 0.00D+00. FoFDir/FoFCou used for L=0 through L=2. End of G2Drv Frequency-dependent properties file 721 does not exist. End of G2Drv Frequency-dependent properties file 722 does not exist.
Most likely, the read-write file (*.rwf in Gaussian’s scratch directory) eats up the available disk space. Even for small systems, some tasks like frequency analysis can require significant amounts of some 50 GB.