[gentoo-dev] Install Problem

[Wilson Brown]

Sir or Madam,

I am new to Gent.
I am by no means a line expert, although I have had a considerable amount of training at Red Hat.  (or maybe I should say that I spent a considerable amount of money for some training at Red Hat.
I am an old cp./m, assembler, DOS, basic, c, Clarion, etc. programmer with almost 30 years experience. 

I am trying to do a full bootstrap installation from stage1-x86-1.4_rc1-20020908.tar.bz2 .
I have read everything that I can find on your website meticulously.
I have printed the "Gent Line 1.4 Installation Instructions" and am trying to follow them to the letter.
I am uncomfortable starting each sentence with "I", but it does seem to be the most efficient method to explain my situation.

I downloaded and burnt the .iso.....no problem.
I have gone through the entire installation process from "2.Booting" through "17.Installation complete!" at least 3 times (each time taking at least 2 days) with no apparent problems.

The problems begin when I reboot.
The first problem I encounter is grub.
Apparently grub cannot find menu.lst (maybe I misread your instruction on where to create it, but I don't think so)
Anyway, I followed your link to the grub tutorial which said that it included emergency procedures (which I didn't find) and found mostly instructions for installing grub on an existing system (which I don't need),  however I did find examples for manually booting to /boot/Image.bz2, and I booted line.

After booting  into line, none of the Code listings in "18.Gent-Stats" work.
Apparently I can no longer get online to do an emerge or anything.

In the Nic listing that I have been able to find, I haven't found any cards that resemble any of the cards that I have.
My current choices are and ADMTek AN983B which is integrated on the motherboard (MSI MS-6378X-L) and an OvisLink 8139ATXC.  Either of them work fine on the CD boot.

Under Code listing 28 under "14.Final steps: kernel and system logger, specifically "make menuconfig"; I am trying to follow your detailed instructions with great specificity (I'm trying to be very careful), but perhaps I am missing something or doing something wrong.

I don't understand why I can get online just fine while booting from the CD, but I can't get online when booting from the HD.
If I can use your default net drivers to get my dhcp up and running from a CD boot, why can't I use those same drivers to get dhcp and the net up and running from an HD boot?....or can I?
If so, how do I do it?

Also, at this point twice I have become so frustrated that I have booted to the CD and restarted the entire process.  Although I probably needed the experience, how do I avoid this in the future.

As a matter of fact I am back at this point again.

I can't move or fix the menu.lst problem because I can't find it.  I guess it is on the /mnt/gentoo/boot directory that has been umounted.
Can I remount this directory to change something in it.  If so, how do I do that?

If I am sending this email to the wrong place, I apologize.

Any detailed help that you can give me on this will be greatly appreciated.
Any further directions as to what I should do or whom I should turn to for help on this project would also be appreciated.

My ultimate goal is to find a line package (distro) that I can install and maintain on my customers (mostly workstations) computers.

Thank you sincerely for your help,
Wilson Brown
BoxwoodSystems