hehe, i never got a chacne to post that i found my driver in the selection that was given to me, i was just using the wrong version of them. anyways, i went ahead an installed Gentoo, but i think i seriously messed things up when setting up the boot loader, and i somehow ended up crashing my whole system. It probably could have been fixed, but i decided to just format anyways cuz it gave me a chance to try out winxp. What could i have done wrong w/ the bootloader? I used Grub. I wanted to use lilo but it would give me a file not found error when i tried to set it up. i followed the directions directly as i was told to on the Gentoo web site, substituting the proper hard drivers. The boot loader should only be installed on my boot partition, right? And then in fdisk, the boot partition should be the only bootable drive, right? thanks