Installing Gentoo
 

I have just attempted to install Gentoo distro of linux, but when extracting the stage 3 .tar it comes up with the following msg:

tar: ./usr/share/man/man3/XS: : Typemap.3pm.gz : wrote only 0 of 10240 bytes.

It a lot of the files that it is extracting then stops.

I have tried different cd roms and cds, could this be because I have a faulty hard drive?

Someone help me!

Hmm, my first inclination is to ask you to make sure that you assigned adequate space to your root partition when you prepared your hard drive to accept Gentoo. It sounds as if you are running out of disk space. Could you run cfdisk on your Gentoo drive and, without changing anything, copy down the info it displays about your partitions and post it here?

that happened me twice, i cleaned the cdrom :) it worked, happened again later, didnt clean, that time i used the dvd rom to install -> worked :D

gentoo install
 

I actually used cfdisk to partition my drives, I am installing it on an 8g seagate drive, with the following partitions:

8000mb - Root partition
520mb - swap
20mb - boot partition

In regards to cleaning the cd, I have treid several different types of media / drives although not a dvd drive, I shall try installing it will my dvdrom drive and see how it goes also.

Thanks.

Well, that looks ok as far as size goes...what file system are you using for root ? If you are not using one of them already I would suggest changing to Reiserfs or ext3 and trying the install again.

I am running a newly installed Gentoo on one machine and encountered problems when I attempted to use Jfs.

Yes I am already using Reisfer (spelling?) and I have also tried with ext3 with no luck. I am aware of the issues with jfs (its in the installation instructions :D )

Sorry if this is obvious, but sometimes the obvious is the thing that bites ya ... are you sure when mounting your partitions you are selecting the 8GB as root? I really can't think of anything that could be causing your problems short of a bad CD (and you seem to have ruled this out) or a partiition too small to accept the data. If your hard drive was bad, it probably would have complained when you initialized the partitions.