Okay i gave up on trying to get RedHat 9 on my laptop so im putting gentoo1.4 on there. i have to start the cd with gentoo nohotplug or it freezes cuz of my firewire issues(ive done some posts on this problem) My question is when the system starts, in gentoo, where does it look to load hardware (usb, firewire etc). I thought it was modules.conf and if that is correct does anyone know of a HOW-TO so i can make my own module loader so i can have it load just the things that i know work (ie usb, eth0) and make it so it wont load things that dont work (ie firewire ports)

I think the commands you are looking for are:

lsmod
insmod
rmmod

but when it loads isnt it going to autodetect or try too, the modules, i have to stop the os from detecting firewire so it wont freeze