WTF!?!? Gentoo broke on its way to stage 3...

Just noticed an error happened about an hour after starting emerge --emptytree system:

/usr/portage/bin/ebuild.sh: line 59: cpio: command not found
!!! ERROR: sys-apps/utempter-0.5.5.5-r1 failed.
!!! Function rpm_src_unpack, Line 76, Exitcode 1
!!! failure unpacking utempter-0.5.5-5.src.rpm
!!! If you need support, post the topmost build error, NOT this status message.

Right above this rpm2targz had just finished successfully. Why did this happen!? (as you read this, put on the Weird Al Yankovic song "Why Does This Always Happen To Me?" in the background)
EDIT: Just tried restarting with emerge system, seems to be working at the moment...

Alright... Am I doing something horribly wrong here? I just did bootstrapping and emerged system in less than 4 hours on a Athlon XP 2700+ with 1GB of RAM... Is that possible? Everything is working fine, and emerge said it finished successfully on emerge system.

yeah that's about riht. emerge system dosn;ttake as oong as bootstarping

When you are compiling stuff, the processor is put under a lot of stress. Often, if it crashes, just restart it and it will work the next time. It's usually a hardware issue with an overheated processor.

The only thing that crashed was emerge... Computer was fine. But it "finished" bootstrapping AND 'emerge --emptytree system' in less than 4 hours total. Everything else I've seen makes me think that on my system it should've taken 6 hours for 'emerge --emptytree system' alone... But everything is working...

One more slight problem... I can't get svgalib-1.9.19-r3 to compile no matter what I do. It always breaks right after 'gzipping man pages' section. I put -svga in /etc/make.conf so that other stuff won't try to compile it, but it worked a couple days ago before I reformatted...

The original error there suggests you might want to try re-emerging cpio. I think it may be part of a package of basic utils though ....