Boot from cd, fdisk your partitions,
mount your linux partition.
Unpack stage1, portage tree.
Mount extra directories needed for hardware access:
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/gentoo/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/mnt
mkdir /mnt/gentoo/scratch
mount -o bind /dev/hdc99 /mnt/gentoo/mnt/scratch
I use an extra scratch partition for portage, building, and later
for more less important stuff.
2005-07, Filesystem consideration: For production usage, I do not recommend reiserfs right now.
I tested it over a few months now with kernel 2.6.11-gentoo-r4 and reiserfsprogs-3.6.19
which have shown to leave the filesystem unstable too often.
First problem: when unmounting, the filesystem is not in a clean state. This
happened several times. Second problems: When the filesystem is being kept running with
about 3/4 usage, at some point (some access patterns) the kernel side
file system drivers bring the kernel into severe difficulties.
They produce lots of hanging (D mode) processes, sound will stop,
shells close weirdly,
the machine won't shutdown anymore. The triggering process stated some memory
allocation error. I could track down the problem like this: It occured within
a perl script, sometimes when unlinking, sometimes when reading a directory, that
weird stuff began.
When used another filesystem doing the same stuff, containing the same
files, the kernel ran smoothly. The hardware was pretty new and did not report
any problems.