Each time I boot from the installation CD, the system scrambles the password for the root user. I found that I needed to boot multiple times from the installation CD after I had completed all installation steps to repair mistakes that I had made (grub could not load my partition). The installation scripts should detect if the user has changed the root password and after that it should *not* create new scrambled passwords.
Well, it scrambles the root password only for the CD user. It should not mess up your gentoo install. I don' t think we can do what you want because we can't write the password you select to the CD for storage, since it's read-only. If you have any other questions about this, feel free to email me at drobbins@gentoo.org. Closing this bug.
Moving these so we can remove the "Install CD" component from "Gentoo Linux". I apologize to everyone for this spam, but according to the bugzilla developers, this is the only reasonable way to do this.
