Mike wrote: "I fear you have just only gotten through the easy part!!" Mike's words rang true this morning. While doing "tar xvjf /mnt/gentoo/portage-latest.tar.bz2 -C /mnt/gentoo/usr" the machine stopped dead. This has happened twice. I fear that I do not have enough hard disk space, but I would hope for a gentler error message. Here is Gentoo Install's last gasp while extracting the Portage snap shot. I was connected to the Gentoo box via ssh. ------------snip from tar output--------- portage/eclass/tla.eclass portage/eclass/perl-app.eclass portage/eclass/gtk-engines.eclass portage/eclass/perl-post.eclass portage/eclass/rpm.eclass portage/eclass/rox.eclass portage/eclass/xfree.eclass Read from remote host 192.168.1.110: No route to host Connection to 192.168.1.110 closed. [1]+ Done emacs /root/.ssh/known_hosts [root@kjones-fedora .ssh]# --------end snip---------- At this point all terminals on the machine do not respond. Is there a way that I can get back to this stage? If I power cycle I get back to the livecd prompt and all my INSTALL work is lost - I think. If [stop a] works I still must boot cdrom to get started again. Any ideas? Here is the hard disk/partition setup. They are not very big :'( -----------snip from fdisk results---------- livecd gentoo # fdisk /dev/sda Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sda (Sun disk label): 16 heads, 135 sectors, 3880 cylinders Units = cylinders of 2160 * 512 bytes Device Flag Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 0 463 500040 83 Linux native /dev/sda2 u 463 694 249480 82 Linux swap /dev/sda3 0 3880 4190400 5 Whole disk /dev/sda4 694 3880 3440880 83 Linux native Command (m for help): q livecd gentoo # fdisk /dev/sdb Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sdb (Sun disk label): 19 heads, 80 sectors, 2733 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1520 * 512 bytes Device Flag Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 0 658 500080 83 Linux native /dev/sdb2 u 658 2733 1577000 83 Linux native /dev/sdb3 0 2733 2077080 5 Whole disk Ken Jones