ok this is the thing i am installing gentoo. i already everything up to and including my kernel done. after the kernel was done compiling i rebooted the computer and then logged into windows then shutdown and started the livecd again. now after that when i go to chroot after mounting the partitions it gives me the error of /bin/bash bad command file or directory does not exist something like that.
T
hat's the first problem the second problem is that
i cannot get the system to boot when i did get the chroot to work (but now it doesn't) and what i have is a dell laptop with a pentium 4 and

30gb hardrive (hda)

then i have an

external 40gb hardrive (sda)

connected with usb 2.0.

The boot partition is sda1

the swap is sda2

the rest is sda3.

When i emerge grub i get the following message

cannot automatically mount your boot partition, you boot partition has to be mounted rw before the installation can continue, error sys-boot/grub0.94-r1 failed, please mount your boot partition manually and like 2 or 3 more errors about the boot partition.

I have windows xp on (hda) i need to be able to dual boot with grub installed entirely on the external. My BIOS supports booting from the usb so it all in theory should work. I would appieciate any help available.

about the grub working once i don't know what i did but after emerging it for like the sixth time it finally went through then i rebooted. it said grub starting and then went to a black screen with a blinking line. forgot to say that. Also like i am not good with grub so if you could try to put it in layman's terms. Thanx a lot for all of the help

makaveli,

From the description of the issue with going back to LiveCD chroot, and grub being unable to automount /boot this tells me you're not mounting your partitions. Going back to the LiveCD, you have to duplicate the process of mounting your / partition on /mnt/gentoo and then mounting any additional partitions under /mnt/gentoo/boot or whatever. Also when doing the grub install, assuming you're in the LiveCD chroot things have to be mounted before chrooting.

Also once you get things working, keep in mind that gentoo does not normally mount /boot. You have to mount boot before doing anything with grub or copying bzImage or System.map.

I'm doing everything on single IDE drives, so I can't help with the details there but I'd make sure you have usb mass storage & friends compiled in for a USB drive.

The gentoo forums would probably be more helpful, even just to search for a similar setup. But whatever

Good Luck!
--glenn

I've just installed Gentoo on a D800 dual boot with WinXP installed first.

I used LILO not GRUB (found it easier to configure) and installed it on the /boot partition - NOT the MBR. This way the WinXP boot loader can boot windows or boot into LILO - you just need to peel off the LILO boot sector from /boot (using dd), whack it onto your WinXP C:\ drive and edit C:\boot.ini.

Make sure you follow the Gentoo installation instructions closely.

I had the same problem. A transformer in my neighborhood blew out during the installation.
I rebooted from cd and remounted hda1 hda3 and the swap but I forgot to remount proc filesystem.
Then I got errors emerging grub.

So after booting from cd again.

# mkswap /dev/hda2
# swapon /dev/hda2
# mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/gentoo
# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot
# mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc
# chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash
# env-update
# source /etc/profile

I am pretty sure you don't need to redo all of those commands and there are more advanced users laughing at me but this worked and got me back to where I needed to be. Hope this helps.

-Exaptation