I have a Dual boot system with windows XP and RH9 running right now. Seeing as my subscription to the RHN was cut off thus keeping me from any more updates I felt it was time to grow up in life. I was wondering if there was any way I could install gentoo linux 1.4 but save my / partition seeing as the driver for my video card (an nVidia) is there. if I can't save it then I'm going to have some issues as X11 won't work until it's installed. So again Is there any way I could save certain sections of the hard drive I have RH9 on right now and Install Gentoo over the system and other such things?

Back them up and install later. But you can't just install Gentoo on your existing / partition and keep the information there, thinking it will work with all the files already there, just doesn't work that way.

The Gentoo installation is text based. You will install a basic system without X first, download the nvidia driver and then install X. Installing the nvidia driver on Gentoo is easy, you just type 'emerge nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx' and configure X by following the instructions given in the manual. Then you do 'emerge xfree'.

I believe the nvidia-glx ebuild pulls in xfree as a dependency so there'd be no real need to re-emerge it afterward. Personally, I like to emerge xfree first before emerging the drivers but that's just me, it really doesn't matter either way as X will still take a fair while to compile and it'll be fairly useless (unless you download the xfree-drm package to get some basic drivers up and running before hand although I don't really recommend that) until you emerge the nVidia drivers so it's probably best to just emerge the drivers and let them sort everything out.