[Sussex] Getting brave ?, perhaps not.

[John D.]

Hi list,

Many thank to those who replied to my ??? about partitions. Though I still 
don't understand it - I put it down to personal stupidity.

Anyway, I followed Steve Dobson's comment's and repartitioned my hard drive as 
hda1 - windows, hda2 - mandrake, hda3 - swap and hda4 - currently empty, but 
as I mentioned bravery in the subject, I've downloaded and burned a copy of 
gentoo 1.4 live, the 2 cd set for pentium4 x86.

and I'm sure that most of you knowledgeable types, have had a good chuckle, so 
the first ??'s

After using partition magic 8 to do the repartitioning of the hard drive, and 
selecting ext3 as the file system what is the best route to start the gentoo 
install?

I have managed to get the 1st cd booting, and printed of the installation 
guide (which seems pretty well written - until it starts going straight over 
my head - there's so much of it!).

Should I follow the guide literally and do the fdisk stuff? Or would I be able 
to skip that and get into it further on ? i.e. as I want to put it onto 
/dev/hda4 (and yes, even though I was asking about partitions earlier last 
week, I'm just going to put it all onto one partition - until I know a hell 
of a lot more about it). My first little snag has been that during the 
earlier stages, I've got as far as mounting partitions, when I try to - mount 
/dev/hda4 /mnt/gentoo - I get "access denied", it will let me do the - mkdir 
/mnt/gentoo/boot - but again, I get the "access denied" reply when I try the 
- mount /dev/hda4 /mnt/gentoo/boot -

Am I just being really thick ? or am I missing something?

Any pointers, idea's, suggestions (except the "f" off back to windows one) 
much appreciated.

regards

John