"[FAILED] Failed to start Switch Root."

[dulepacov]

I get that message when powering gentoo on my laptop. I've installed gentoo with rEFInd on macbook 7,1 (2010 13inch model, one with core 2 duo and nvidia 320M). Besides the error in the title it also mentioned "entering emergency mode. exit the shell to continue. Type journalcrl to view system logs. You might want to save #txt location# to a USB stick or /boot. After mounting them and attach it to a bug report. Press Enter for maintenance or Control-D to continue"

Also keybaord does not work, I have to use an usb keybaord to do anything.

It also provided a log file which I am not sure how to copy, considering how little on the system works.

[John R. Graham]

I have experienced this exact issue when critical directories are missing in the nascent /mnt/gentoo install directory. In particular, if dev is missing, then the keyboard (and many other things) will not be available. You can reboot your install media, mount the root partition on /mnt/gentoo and poke around to see if anything is missing. Look in particular for dev, proc, and sys.

[dulepacov]

Thank you. Unfortunately the laptop I was trying to install gentoo on decided to kill itself (due to it's age, it was over 15 years old architecture). Hopefully this will be of use when installing gentoo on another machine