Partitions not seen after fdisk

[Plinko]

I am currently looking for a linux distro for playing my old dos games using emulation. I tryed vector linux and found it to be lacking. I am Trying to install gentoo linux using the documentation. I have come to the point in the documentation where i have created the partitions on the hard drive. But now i cant put file systems on the individual partitions because
the partitions will not show up in my dev directory. My hard drive is shown as hdd1 in my dev directory. When i run fdisk and display the partitions they are lised as hdd1p1, hdd1p2,and hdd1p3. I am very new to this but i want to learn it because I am tired of babysitting XP.

[frostschutz]

/dev/hdd1 is not a hard drive.

The hard drive would be /dev/hdX (in your case /dev/hdd probably, if it's the slave drive on IDE1), and the partitions are /dev/hdXn (n a number 1-??). If you ran something like 'fdisk /dev/hdd1', you probably created partitions on your first partition of the harddrive.

Solution: Create partitions on /dev/hdd and then format /dev/hdd1. That should make the bogus partitions on /dev/hdd1 go away.

[Plinko]

Thank you that was exactly what i wanted to know.