/, /swap, /home What about /boot?
 

Could I just make my /home the rest of the hard drive and just use some ext2 programs for windows to view it?

And what about /boot because i'm multi-booting.

It's usual, though not compulsory, to have the /boot partition as about 50 - 100MB. Depending on your BIOS, boot loader and hard drive geometry it may even be compulsory to have a small boot partition right at the front of the drive.

If you REALLY want windows to view your /home partition you could format it as FAT32 (VFAT) and then both linux and windows can view it. I would steer clear of EXT2, it can be quite easy to corrupt if there's a power outage or you don't shut down correctly. I like reiser, but windows can't view that.

it is technically possible to acces reiser under windows, rfstool among others. but that's only technically. trying to access linux fs under windows is just a horrible idea, and should be avoided at all costs.

no idea how /boot is meant to fit into this though...

RE
 

Alright so right now i'm going to create
/boot -100MB
/ -root 2GB
/swap -1024mb

and just format the rest of the space as FAT32.

But now when I extract the tarball for amd from the gentoo cd. Where do I extract it to?

Do I mount / root as /mnt/root ?

And then just do the tar -xvjpf stage-amd balbalba.bzip /mnt/root

if you're installing gentoo, jsut follow each and every word of the gentoo installation guide. that will tell you everythign you need to know

RE
 

Done all of that. Just wanted to understand more to be extra definitive of my actions.

I just fell into a little trap a few weeks ago when I proceeded with creating all the partitions like /usr, /tmp because I read a tutorial and I went on with extracting the tarball to /mnt/usr blablabla and I received an error after 4 minutes of it copying files. So i'm just trying to do this again and see if the same thing happens while extracting to the /.

Re: RE
 

I think I'd have left a little more space on / because 2GB isn't gonna leave you much room to install software.

(also, you know that 1024MB = 1GB?)

RE
 

Yes i do know that because i have 512mb ram.
So i'll give me / root 5GB

So all i have to do now is mount the / root as /mnt/root/ and extract the tarbal and run it. ok.
that is right! right?

RE
 

Alright everything extracted fine. Now i'm going to get on with the directions i've written down.

Never saw anything in the handbook about /mnt/boot did you /mnt/gentoo and later chroot? You must follow the handbook step by step.

IMO, 100 megabytes for /boot is just wasting space. I made my 16 megabytes. I still have enough room for ramdisk images and kernels.

If you are dual booting between Windows and Linux, you do not need to make partition for /boot. Though if you are thinking to boot to multiple Linux distributions and Windows, you can make partition for /boot.