I tried to compile ghc-5.00.2 on a RedHat-7.1 system by booting from HC files. (Actually, I have a ghc-5.00 installed, but apparently some programs compiled with it segfault, and this makes compilation of ghc-5.00.2 impossible. Note that I have a working happy-1.10, however.)

Now it seems that the distrib/hc-build script is broken.

Yes it is, sorry about that. There are several open bug reports on SourceForge relating to the broken hc bootstrapping situation. I'm working on fixing it, so hopefully the next release will have reliable hc bootstrapping again. Your particular problem can be solved by (a) getting the .hs files that are generated from the .hsc files in the libraries, and (b) making in ghc/lib/std and hslibs before ghc/utils. Having the .hs files means you don't need hsc2hs in order to build the libraries and works around the chicken/egg problem. Cheers, Simon