You can always boot any Linux rescue system (Knoppix) and use gparted to figure out the partitioning, then continue their cli install. I do agree that partitioning by commandline is scary biz. A good TUI (think weechat, htop, tmux quality) would do great for this purpose. That is, if the machine is a pet and not cattle.

Repartitioning from another distro (Elementary in my case, due to WiFi and trackpad support) is what I did for most of the installs. I still wasn't fully sure how to run the CLI commands for a particular partition, rather than a full disk. In the end, Redcore just gave a better installation process for the same backend kernel.

Speaking of Knoppix, though, it worked great for USB boot, but I couldn't for the life of me manage to get Knoppix booting from an internal partition. Flashing the ISO makes 3 partitions from USB, and if I copy those to internal partitions with cp -Lr, and set the boot flags, they're still not detected. Eventually I just used Kanotix.

> command-line partitioning is just too risky

So partitioning a device is less risky with a GUI? That doesn't make sense.

EDIT: I should be more constructive:

I know that the command line scares some people, but that's just like computers in general scare most people, it's just something you have to get over with.

Another "scary" thing is the choice that exists between multiple available partitioning tools, I know it took me some time before I decided that the good old fdisk was my choice, but really, it probably doesn't matter, any should be OK. You probably won't actually do it directly from the command line anyway, e.g. fdisk is dialog driven instead.

Lastly, I doubt that it isn't possible to fire up Xorg from the Gentoo install media and then partition from a GUI tool, if that's what you want.

I personally find it easier to see the gui layout of my disk before I press play. Gparted can queue and execute a lot of changes to get to your desired state. Very intuitive for people like myself who doesn't deal with partition layouts and filesystems on a daily basis.

Don't get me wrong, seeing the layout is great if you don't mind the requirement for a GUI, but the fdisk UI is actually pretty good, too. It also queues and executes a lot of changes to get to your desired state, and it can show all the sizes and offsets that define the partition layout. It's not actually a command line tool, but dialog-driven (you give it commands on-line, get built-in help, etc.).

To reiterate the point you are replying to:

Using a command-line partitioning utility like parted or fdisk is more risky to interface with, at least for the layman.

Am I using GPT tables? How many blocks for this partition again? What partition type am I marking this? Am I using a capital G to denote gigabyte? A plus sign before or after the number? What is the current state? What is the planned state?

These aren't particularly difficult questions, but they are more easily answered when using a GUI tool like GParted than they are when using fdisk or parted.

GParted is an excellent GUI. I personally haven't seen a more reliable and usable partition utility. It's my first and last recommendation, no matter what the user's background, and it will likely continue to be for a very long time.

Cfdisk. Much better and still terminal based.

Better than fdisk? Yes. Better than GParted? I don't think so.

I did try to run startx from the Gentoo installer, but it isn't available.

Command-line partitioning isn't the problem, per se, it's the lack of manual config options. Zenwalk (Slackware) has a command-line installer, and that detected my existing partitions correctly and let me install.