Awesome. I don't mind messing around with things trying to figure them out on my own, but I just want to be able to get the install to a point where I can restart the computer and log into the distro so it's officially "installed" before I run into too many major issues. Plus I know I'll feel a need to push forward until I log in the first time after a reboot without chrooting in. After that I'll just work on it whenever I have some spare time, but until then I'm going to probably want to get through it as efficiently as possible until I know everything worked (or not) haha.

Anyways, thanks again for the help.

It is done...sort of

Since you guys were nice enough to help I figure I'll keep you updated on my progress.

About 7:30 or so last night I started the gentoo install process. I had my partitions setup mostly before and went in guns blazing. I followed the handbook and everything went relatively smoothly. My network detected and setup automatically and I was on my way. It seemed alot more intuitive then I had actually thought it would be, not sure if I just knew more then I thought or had picked up more skimming over the documentation beforehand.

By about 10:30 or 11 it was time to reboot the system. I probably could have even shrunk the time down a bit more but I watched tv while things were happening to wasted a few minutes here and there lol. Getting my boot loader set up was a bit of a pain for some reason... so I semi-cheated and used the ubuntu installer to auto detect my OS's and install grub for me haha. I still don't know why my grub file wasn't working when I set it up myself, as the options were identical in both. Ah well, it works haha.

I now have a working, bootable, Gentoo system with a root and a user for myself for everyday use. Currently I'm at a bit of a brick wall as I apparently missed a module upon compiling the kernal required for DHCP so my network isn't being set up properly. Tonight after work I'll hopefully be able to recompile the kernel and add the needed modules without much problem. I should have spent more time when choosing modules to install in the kernal so I guess that was my own fault on account of carelessness and eagerness to see a booting system haha. Regardless other then that the process went well and at least I have a system to try to work on now

If only DHCP module is missing, you should be able to test your network using a fixed IP address, isn't it ?
I guess that you should simply connect to your router and see the router's address, it's probably something like 192.168.1.1, pick up temporarily a fixed address like 192.168.1.4, and test that your PC is able to ping the router.

Yea that would make sense. I've been doing some reading and it turns out I missed a few others things I want to have installed so I'll probably still just re-do the kernel tonight and hopefully that'll take care of that problem and a few others I forsee me having eventually otherwise.

yes, you can keep your current /boot partiton (provided that the current grub install has its own /boot partiton)

just add the gentoo kernel to that /boot partiton, and edit the config accordingly.

Yea I managed to get that working. My main concern was I had never tried botting OS's off two drives. Whenever I've had two drives in the past the second was always just for storage so I wasn't sure if there were any issues. But luckily it was straightforward for the most part

My own experience is with Mandrake, I really had no problem. I had one system disk, a data disk, and the third disk had a Windows data partition and some free space. I let the total automated install run, choosing "use the remaining free space", it created the partitions on the third disk and automatically configured Lilo for dual-boot, and everything worked fine immediately.
Of course, I let the install program manage everything automatically, did not configure the boot things manually.

Yea, it turns out the boot loaders aren't too bad to set up manually. I DID end up using the ubuntu boot loader installer as it auto scans and sets it up for everything, but that's just because I think I missed an option that was causing the gentoo boot to fail. For the most part they aren't horrible. I was just worried that having boot loaders on multiple drives could cause conflicts, but luckily they seem to have taken care of everything so no fears w00

No, no real problem due to the fact that you have multiple drives.
The problems mainly arise because of human beings, if you mistype the disk names ; most problems arise because if you boot on one disk the disk names are not the same than if you boot from another one, so the full path to the boot program may be completely false if you enter it manually. If it boots correctly, this means that you were smart enough and did no mistake.

anouther fantastic feature of grub (and probably lilo) is chainload.

the chainload command passes control to anouther boot loader, justincase you want to do somthing crazy like boot windows.



(ohh, and use rootnoverify for partitons with file-systems that grub cant read, like NTFS windows)

So even if you went completely insane, and installed a differant boot loader for each non-windows Operating system, you could still boot all those differant boot loaders from the same boot disk....

head spinning..........?

what im basically saying, is that GRUB (and lilo) are so very configureable, that no matter what horrible mess you make of your partiton tables, and disk layouts, grub will be able to handle it.