ok, for the last two days i have been trying to install gentoo following the installation docs provided in the gentoo.org website to the letter. after completing all the steps listed in the installation docs, i proceeded to reboot the machine. upon reboot, im greeted by the grub> prompt screen? i think it may have to do with my grub.conf but not sure. below is the exact message i get after rebooting

GNU GRUB Version 0.96 (638K lower / 785344K upper memory)

[Minimal BASH-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible completions of a device/filenme. ]

grub>

any advise is appreciated

you can enter the commands found in the bootloader configuration page one at a time at the grub prompt.such as root=(hd0,0), kernel=/path to kernel, etc. you may be able to get in this way, or you can boot with the installation disk again and do the /mount/hdaX /mnt/gentoo; /mount/hdaX /mnt/gentoo/boot; chroot /mnt/gentoo; then have another attempt at moving the kernel image and system map to /boot and editing grub.conf

You will need to make sure ramdisk and initrd is compiled as builtin during configuring and compiling the kernel. Also you will need to make sure /initrd is listed in the root directory which Gentoo developers have not yet add to the stage 3 installation. Another thing that the documentation missed is making an initrd file. To do this use mkinitrd. Of course you will need to emerge mkinitrd just to use it. The grub config file is menu.lst and I do not know why Gentoo developers choose to do a symbolic link that points from grub.conf to menu.lst. It does help to set the boot flag of for the /boot and / root partition to make it little easier to boot up. It should not corrupt the data by setting this flag.

Summary:
1) Make directory called initrd in Gentoo root directory
2) Check if kernel has ram disk and initrd compiled as built-in
3) emerge mkinitrd
4) run mkinitrd to create a ram disk file or initrd file
5) edit menu.lst not grub.conf