I wanted to make only three partitions in my (first) installation of gentoo : / /boot /home with the partition / having 2Go ; in mind, I wanted to make /home big and to move /var/tmp/portage from / to /home with a symbolic link like /var/tmp -> /home/tmp. And the assurance that the gentoobox will boot event when /home is full. It broke many, many things, very early in the installation (the command emerge vanilla-sources deleted /usr/bin/emerge and /usr/lib/portage/bin/emerge, even if chrooted or booted with stage3-x86-2004.2). SOLUTION SUGGESTED: The handbook, in the above part, should state that one shouldn't add symbolic links in /var (and maybe /usr) to balance the load of cumulative size of files between partitions. Apparently this is because the gentoo use symbolic links containing the folder .. (two dots). The SuSE didn't use such symbolic links, and I have made load-balancing between partition in many suse installation without problem.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 55620 ***