Installing Gentoo With Separate /home Partition With Files

[ntowakbh]

I don't think that this would really fall under the partitioning sticky, since the drive is already partitioned.

I am trying to install Gentoo on to my computer for the first time. I already have the drive partitioned, but I want to dual boot. Because of this, I want to share the separate /home partition that I have already created with Gentoo and Debian. I am using the live CD graphical installer.

However, once I get to the point in the installer after selecting partitions, it bombs out, and tells me to check a log. In said log, it tells me that it is unable to install as the installer does not support installing to a file system that already has files.

I already had this problem once for the root partition and fixed the problem by telling it to reformat the root partition. Obviously though, this deletes the files, which isn't something that I want to do on the /home partition.

Simply put, is this possible to do with the graphical installer? If not, is it possible at all, if so, how?

Also, a Google search wasn't able to help me, because it kept turning up too many irrelevant results to even filter through.

Any help at all is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[DONAHUE]

The graphical installer is buggy and obsolete. You probably told the installler that you had a partition that should be used for /home. If you insist on the installer, don't tell it about the separate partition. Later, post install, you can blank the /home directory in the root partition and

[ntowakbh]

[cwr]

It's best these days not to use the 2008.0 Gentoo disk, which doesn't have the
drivers to cope with some recent systems. And never, ever use the disk's Gentoo
installer, which has an awful reputation for failing installs and damaged partition tables.

To install Gentoo you need, at a minimum:

1) A way of booting Linux on the system (eg: the current Gentoo Minimal CD, or a
current SysRescue CD, or your current Linux installation if it has partitions to spare).

2) A Stage3 file, around 100MB (get one from the current builds directory on this site).

3) A Portage snapshot, around 30MB (get one from the same place as the Stage3).

Then boot into Linux and unpack the Stage3 to what will become your root partition, and
unpack the snapshot into what will become /usr/portage. You're now doing the sort of
install covered very thoroughly by the Gentoo documentation.

You'll need an Internet connection from now on in, since to build a kernel you need to
download at least the sources to build a kernel ("emerge gentoo-sources"), and possibly
some tools. You could copy the kernel and its associated modules across from a Gentoo
Minimal CD, but to build any useable system you'd still need net access - I can't recall if
the Minimal CD even has X.

Good luck - Will