I'm trying to perform the IBD on Bitcoin Core 0.18 and I continually receive "Fatal Internal Error" at seemingly random intervals, closing bitcoin-qt and preventing me from fully syncing. Farthest I've gotten so far has been 5% after hours of trying and reindexing. I might make it to 6 years back if I'm lucky, once to 5 years, but my luck has never held out any longer. Attempts to reindex result in the sync rewinding to about 8 years back, representing <1% of the entire download. I'm at my wits end.

The error I'm receiving in the debug.log is:

2019-07-22T00:14:07Z Error: Error: A fatal internal error occurred, see debug.log for details 2019-07-22T00:19:17Z ERROR: ConnectTip: ConnectBlock 0000000000000af5808c422d13a9bd6580e72a9db9a543336cb6834c9db75a40 failed, bad-txnmrklroot, hashMerkleRoot mismatch (code 16) 2019-07-22T00:19:17Z ERROR: ProcessNewBlock: ActivateBestChain failed (bad-txnmrklroot, hashMerkleRoot mismatch (code 16)) 2019-07-22T00:19:17Z *** Corrupt block found indicating potential hardware failure; shutting down

I don't know what's causing the corruption. I've tested my hardware and everything checks out fine. I ran badblocks on the SSD, memtester on the RAM, and monitored the CPU core temps during the sync--a constant, frosty 35 degrees C. My OS is completely up-to-date. There's nothing obviously wrong with this system and the hardware exceeds requirements.

What could be going on here? And is there any hope that I can actually get this node setup or am I out-of-luck?

System Specs: Bitcoin Core 0.18

OS: Linux Mint

CPU: i5-8500 4.1GHz

1TB SSD

8GB RAM