My install was going fine. I has just chrooted and was working on flags when I decided to add my user I su to my user to make sure all was well. My user was in the wheel group and I know the first thing I did was add my root passwd for my install. In most of the posts I read it said use sudo su which doesn't work. I don't want to start over. suggestions please.

You mean you were root and then you su'd to another user? Then you can get back to your original root shell by typing exit.

I would say use sudo OR su, not both.
* sudo executes one command with root owner, but your group
* su changes you to root:<group> where <group> is your user's group
* su - changes you to root:root

EDIT: * chroot <location> changes the location of / from that terminal's perspective. It's usually a major PITA, as if you try to go doing stuff you need a working /proc, /sys, & /var which are written up as the kernel goes along. But it can be useful.

It also changes your environment to root's, which su doesn't.
It's essential when installing Gentoo. Gentoo comes as a skeleton filesystem tarball which you unpack on a mounted partition. You have to create the dynamic directories by binding them to the ones on your host system. Then you chroot across to carry out the rest of the installation. Now that I come to think of it, it's not unlike the way you build LFS.

This changed a bit. You only have to mount '/' somewhere on the running system (i mounted mine under '/gentoo') and when you follow the document for Gentoo install it creates the directories underneath '/' for you.

@OP: follow the document. Simple pick the type of system you are installing on and it will get you to a bare bone system that boots. I just finished install Gentoo and it's running nicely. One tip I will give you is is you plan on booting UEFI then make sure you booted the system using UEFI. Makes life a lot easier.

Thanks I'll keep that in mind. But su didn't work because it wanted my root passwd which it wasn't accepting. Since I was so far along I just had to mount my file systems and go from there.

What do you need su for you should already be root.

In a chroot environment, e.g. sysrescue-cd, you are already user root.

Just use the gentoo handbook just as a recommendation. It has many flaws, many incorrect things. also gentoo wiki has many typos. The advanced user sees it quite fast

You just need to do the necessary steps. The user creation is just the same as it always was. When you are unable to enter your box after reboot, just chroot again and redo the part of creating the users.

the gentoo handbook is quite wrong on mount -rebind options and such, filesystems, swap, and such. Endless topic

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sudo su, is for linux mint based distros, not for gentoo. it gives you a permanent superuser shell, because su does not work properly on linux mint, it enforces sudo. sudo is very very very very bad.

in gentoo it's enough to login as user root, or use su as your user to get privilege