You might need to reinstall the boot loader to the master boot record (MBR) if it becomes corrupted or erased. This can occur for example if Windows is installed on another partition which overwrites the MBR.
There are two ways to reinstall grub, automatically using grub-install, and manually through grub itself. grub-install is a script which [...]

Normally in Gentoo you would want to create an init script via rc-update to start a service at boot. However if there are a few miscellaneous commands you would like to run you can add them to local.start.
The local.start init script is similar to rc.local in other distributions. It is the last init script [...]

The ext3 file system forces an fsck once it has been mounted a certain number of times. By default this maximum mount count is usually set between 20-30. On many systems such as laptops which can be rebooted quite often this can quickly become a problem. To turn off this checking you can use [...]