emerge gentoo-sources fails

Dear Alpha list,

My hard drive crashed, so I'm trying to reinstall from scratch.
When I get to the emerge gentoo-sources step,  it seems to go all the 
way, then ends with a status 1 exit message.

The log files do not indicate the reason for failure, just that it 
happens.
During the installation, it throws up some errors about econfdir and 
/dev/fd/62 doesn't exist (I don't have it written down handy).  I'm 
thinking that happened before (when it worked) and didn't matter.

I have tried several times.  I've wiped the drive between tries, changed 
my mirror list, changed profile...  no luck.

I looked at the file date for the kernel source on a mirror.  It's 
pretty old, so it should be the same as what worked before.
I'm wondering about the ebuild, but I don't how such things work.  It 
worked fine a couple weeks ago.

Any suggestions about how to figure out the problem?

I imagine that emerging gentoo-sources is best, but could I just 
download a 3.7.10 tgz file from www.kernel.org and make one that way?

Adios,  DW