i dont have a /boot partition, only a / and a swap. i didn't want to re partition my drive. also, i have a windows drive
hda1 is win2k ... ill get rid of it soon but it's got all of my mp3's etc
hdb1 is /
hdb2 is swap

lilo is on mbr of hda

mabye post your fstab or somthing? it might help.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage
# efficiency). It is safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to
# switch between notail and tail freely.

# <fs> <mount point> <type> <opts> <dump/pass>

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.

#/dev/hdb1 /boot ext3 noauto,noatime 1 2
/dev/hdb1 / ext3 noatime 1 1
/dev/hdb2 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

ive tried doing different things to it, like commenting out the boot partition and setting the / partition to 11 instead of 01 none work any better.

is missing 'emerge system' original problem?
 

It looks like Goatdemon moved on to try a stage-3 installation instead of his original approach, but I found this thread because I had the same original problem and I may have a clue about its solution.

It turns out that there are two handbooks:
1) http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...ndbook-x86.xml
2) http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml

The former is "newer", and perhaps still has some kinks. Perhaps one of those kinks is a missing instruction. Something like:
emerge system
seems to be necessary, according to the older handbook and other documentation I've seen lying around. Perhaps this is a major omission, or perhaps it's just hidden cleverly, or perhaps it's not necessary. I'm currently in the process of trying this step (after re-chrooting) to see if it installs some of the apparently missing tools, like 'mount' and 'shutdown' (Like Goatdemon, I was asked to login when the mount of /proc failed; unlike Goatdemon, I'd managed to passwd successfully at the very end of my install, though I couldn't do it earlier where the instructions said. Anyway, once I was "in", I confirmed that there was no 'mount' available for for me to run. I tried halting/rebooting and discovered that those basic tools were also not installed. One thing led to the next and this became the evidence for my proposal here.)

Note that I'm completely new to Gentoo -- today was my first attempt. I haven't attempted the installation "all over again", and doubt that would perform any automagic. We'll see how my 'emerge system' comes out (in several hours perhaps)....