The truth is rarely pure and never simple

Gaussian 09: segmentation violation

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.

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