Lilo will not emerge, new install

[ixjr]

I've installed Gentoo a few times and never run into this problem. Following the online guide essentially straight through up to this point, emerge lilo initially fails on its last (2nd) dependency with
"Cannot automatically mount your /boot partition. Your boot partition has to be mounted rw before the installation can continue. lilo needs to install important files there.
ERROR: sys-boot/lilo-22.5.8-r1 failed.
Function mount-boot_mount_boot_partition, Line 53, Exitcode 0
Please mount your /boot partition manually!"

The lines prior if they are relevant initially said
>>> Merging sys-boot/lilo-22.5.8-r1 to /
cat: /proc/mounts: No such file or directory
cat: /proc/mounts: No such file or directory

So sure enough, its not there. I exited the chroot environment and there is a /proc/mounts at the initial from CD boot level. I copied mounts from there to /mnt/gentoo/proc/

Chrooted to /mnt/gentoo again, used cat /proc/mounts again and this time it returned everything it should - all 6 partitions properly mounted and all listed as rw. Again attempted to emerge lilo and got the exact same final error but the two cat: lines prior had disappeared (and were not replaced with any new errors).

Last thing I looked into was to was to use 'df' but it lists only my / partition as being mounted - I actually have six partitions mounted. Exited chroot and repeated df and it lists all six mounted properly as expected. I umounted and remounted /boot to no avail and back within the chroot environment it says its not mounted if I umount, but since it really is when I try to mount it again it tells me its already mounted or busy. *sigh*

Sorry for the lengthy post, any suggestions to get me by this one? Logic dictates that I need to convince the chroot environment that more than / is mounted but I don't know how.

PS. Grub won't work on this box so thats not an option.

[diastelo]

Before you chroot into the hard drive, did you remember to do the following?

[ixjr]

Ack!!!

I did all my mkdir and mount for various folders like /boot

I didn't do the ...

mkdir /mnt/gentoo/proc
mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc

...or at least I don't remember doing that step.

Thanks so much, thats bound to be it.