[JimRune]

So I've partitioned an entire 250GB hard drive to install Gentoo Linux on.. Installation went smoothly, however booting wasn't.

On my attempt to boot into Gentoo, I got a bunch of artifacts on the screen. Some of them were blinking, which indicated to me that I was in a text prompt. So I hit enter, and it took me to a black screen with white lines evenly spaced down the screen, but there was text on there that said Grub failed to boot because of "Error 17 : Cannot mount selected partition".

I'm installing Gentoo from the LiveCD and I've no clue how to navigate it so I can access the grub.conf file on the hard drive to make sure it's good. I formatted the drive and am reinstalling Gentoo right now just to make sure everything went over fine.

So, has anyone ever heard of this happening before? Google yields no relevant results, unfortunately.

EDIT: Alright, I'm fairly certain I've figured out what the problem is. Both hard drives I'm using are SATA and thus do not need to be designated master or slave. However, when I installed GRUB to the MBR, it wanted to be able to distinguish the drives in this manner and since it was unable to, I was unable to boot Gentoo and also not able to boot Windows. FIXMBR command in the Recovery console yielded no results (neither did fixboot). I re-wrote the grub.conf file several times (Had to navigate using the console and use nano in order to actually save the file) but that was to no avail as well.

So I'm just going to have to wipe my Windows install (I've backed up everything already) and start from scratch. Next time I won't install GRUB to the Master Boot Record, if it can be avoided (which I really hope it can). I can use NTLDR, right?

Also, can I use Lilo instead of GRUB? I'm on an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ and when I'm using the GUI installer for Gentoo, it says that I have no choice but to use Grub because of my processor. Is that correct? I'd really like to avoid using Grub for the time being...