yeah thats what i thopught. my system was failing long before reaching that point.

I have now solved the second problem (it was a bug in Gentoo's kernel utility which for some reason was not selecting the kernel option for automatically mounting partitions on boot, i made the change manually and recompiled and installed the kernel again, and it booted fine first time)


Thank you to whansard and jailbait for your help in solving my first (the origianl post) problem, and i am now nearly happy my system is up and running.

Thanks guys