My new Gentoo boots as a live cd from my hard drive.

baarod · n00b Joined: 26 May 2025 Posts: 2

I searched a bit and found nothing so sorry if this has been asked before, why is my Gentoo install booting as a live CD? I turned the computer completely off, removed the boot USB and restarted. Still comes up as the live CD. Did I use the wrong Stage 3 or something? Thanks!

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon May 26, 2025 6:48 pm Post subject:

What attributes lead you to believe it boots up as the Live CD? If you are expecting a GUI, then note that, with Gentoo, you only get what you install. At the point in the standard Handbook install where you unmount everything & reboot without the install media inserted, you normally would not yet have installed any desktop environment.

If this is what is happening to you, let me know and I can point you to the appropriate guides to continue. In other words, your Gentoo journey is just starting, but you're off to a great start!

- John
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baarod · n00b Joined: 26 May 2025 Posts: 2

John R. Graham · Posted: Mon May 26, 2025 7:38 pm Post subject:

Well first of all, I'd like to save you some work if I can. It's really easy to re-enter the chroot; no need to restart the Handbook install. Here's how:

Boot into the install media and get the network running (usually the net-setup script).
Mount your root partition on /mnt/gentoo.
Do sections 1.1 (Copy DNS Info), 1.2 (Mounting the necessary filesystems), and 1.3 (Entering the new environment) only from the Installing the Gentoo base system chapter of the Handbook.

And, voila, you're very quickly back in the chroot and can do any corrections you need to do.

Second, if you follow the Handbook for your install, there's literally no way that the livecd is available after you reboot without the install media mounted. What you're referring to as the "intro app" is likely just the initialization sequence that you'd see when any Gentoo system boots. Hopefully that's a clue for you.

Regarding the possibility of the wrong stage3, that's unlikely given your progress, but tell me a bit about your machine and the name of the stage3 you used to be sure.

Let me know about your partition layout, too, please.

- John
_________________
I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

Benni12345678 · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2024 Posts: 6

Of course gentoo will always boot the live cd from the usb stick if you have set your bios to boot from the stick and forgot to remove the stick after you installed gentoo....
Same happens if you leave a bootable cd in the harddrive and restart. If the bios is set to start from cd, it will always launch this first...

In these cases, just pull the bootable usb stick or the cd/dvd/blueray physically from your computer and restart.
Restarting can be done by writing

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 23493

OP explicitly stated that the USB stick was removed prior to reboot:

Benni12345678 · n00b Joined: 08 Dec 2024 Posts: 6

really sure that the USB was removed?
That can indeed not be that it starts from a cd that was physically removed...

So he confuses the operating system installed on the harddrive with the live cd

Next is then to login and consult the handbook to emerge a gui, either kde or gnome or xfce, and some applications if its used as a desktop...