Gentoo Live cd not able to open Hd

I d/l and burned the new Gentoo Universal Live cd for x86. I had no difficulty getting network connectivity working, using the installation guide. However, I am unable to partition my disks. The "fdisk /dev/hda" command returns an error message "unable to open hda." Same story for hdb. I have 2 Maxtor IDE drives, a 20 and 40 gig. No other Linux distro I have installed (Corel, Xandros, Redhat 6.0, 6.1, Slackware, Debian, Progeny, Libranet 2.7, 2.81, Lindows, Suse 7.3, 8.2, 9.0) has had this problem. I am obviously unable to get past this point.

As much as I love Debian-based distros I was looking forward to having all my apps compiled the way I want them, and not having every device driver in the world installed by default. (Yes, I recompile my kernels to fix that!) I love a system that I have to tinker with! any advice or suggestions?

please run

Code:

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fdisk -l

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thats fdisk -L (but in lowercase, incase you thought it was an i)

also try cfdisk, nor sure if its available on the live cd though.

hmmm....

Don't quote me on this, but I think with the 'live CD's' you actually have to mount the hard drive before you can fdisk it. Maybe, but I'm not positive. Can you provide more information?

You say you haven't had this problem with any other distro's, but were they the CD version, or the installed version?

Jeremy

Wow. How was I to know Gentoo thought my hard drives were:
/dev/ide/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/disc and
/dev/ide/host2/bus0/target1/lun0/disc?

Using those got me all the way to installing grub. At that point it seems to me like the new kernel and grub, not having ide-scsi working yet, decided those devices didn't exist. They didn't like hda or hdb, either.

It's been a long day. I worked on tracking down a pesky weirdness with bttv support, which means I recompiled the kernel no less than 5 times. I reinstalled my trusty Libranet to get online, but left 40 gig free for distro-playing. I'll be trying again in a couple of days. Any advice on getting grub to work?

you could do:

ln -sf /dev/ide/host2/bus0/target0/lun0/disc /dev/hda

ln -sf /dev/ide/host2/bus0/target1/lun0/disc /dev/hdb

cfdisk /dev/hda