Gentoo install

I've decided to give Gentoo a try on my laptop. I currently have it booting
Win95 and RH linux, but want to just overwrite the RH partitions with the gentoo
install. I can't boot from the cdrom and the install instructions on Gentoo's
site don't show how one might boot from dos into the installer.

I'm guessing I'll have to do something similar to booting RH by using a .bat
file and linload.exe. Tried copying the kernel image from \isolinux\ on the cd
(burned the .iso). ran linload kernel and it crashed out complaining about it
not being compressed:

Uncompressing Linux...

invalid compressed format (err=1)

-- System halted

Tried using the rescue.gz file, but it requests a kernel image to load.