mounting confusion

[JoelKlabo]

I am reading through the manual and I understand everything up to the section on mounting the partitions that I have just made:

[JoelKlabo]

I must admit, on a side note. The title of this topic is one of the best I have come up with.
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I want to compile a OS specifically for my hardware, how awesome is that.

[NathanZachary]

The names of the folders, /mnt, /mnt/gentoo, and /mnt/gentoo/boot are really arbitrary. You can name them whatever you want as long as you follow that naming scheme throughout the installation.
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“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
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[JoelKlabo]

ok so I have to mkdir to create all of those directories, and then mount all of them? Can you mount multiple directories? I know this is trivial but in the example in the manual it does not show the first directory being made, it is just already being mounted. As you can see I am confused, any additional info would be greatly appreciated. I would like to understand what is happening, if possible.
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I want to compile a OS specifically for my hardware, how awesome is that.

[NeddySeagoon]

JoelKlabo,

There are some standard names for linux folders and their contents. You can see what they are all supposed to be called and used for here

Its a convention to use /mnt for this sort of thing and the Gentoo liveCD provides /mnt/gentoo as a convienence for you as the point where your own Gentoo install will be attached the the filesystem provided by the liveCD.
You mount (attach) the top level of your install file system here.
When you do mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot you are creating a directory called /boot inside the top level of your own install. The liveCD cannot provide this mount point as it cannot exist until your own install space is located at /mnt/gentoo
You need a mount point inside /mnt/gentoo for every partition you want to mount (except swap)
Many users have a separate /home partition, which requires you to make a /mnt/gentoo/home
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[JoelKlabo]

so are the /mnt/gentoo directories located on the cd originally? And then the hard drive mounts to them in order to copy files? mounting is a temporary action?
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I want to compile a OS specifically for my hardware, how awesome is that.

[JoelKlabo]

thank you very much for the reply by the way. the Linux file system site is very informative as well.
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I want to compile a OS specifically for my hardware, how awesome is that.

[NeddySeagoon]

JoelKlabo

The terns Mount Points and Directoriy are often confused by new users.

A mount point is a directory where you intend to attach a partition to make its contents accessible. Nothing more.
When the partition is mounted on the mount point, files copied there go into the partition.
When the partition is not mounted, the files go into the directory on the partition on which the directory was created.

When the liveCD starts, it creates is own root file system in RAM. The mount point /mnt/gentoo is therefore a directory in a ramdrive.
It is possible to untar the stage 3 to the space in RAM if you forget to mount your own root partition there.

Mounting can be a temporary operation e.g. if you mount a USB drive or a CDROM, however, its useful for some mounts to persist across reboots. For permanently installed media, these are written in /etc/fstab.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.