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I'm currently trying to install gentoox natively as discussed in another post here, but I've had one big hangup.

How do I extract the contents of the rootfs file?

I've tried mounting it in KNOPPIX and copying the files out to a partition, but it always hangs up on the /dev/ directory, or some symlink somewhere. How do I get around this, and is it necessary to copy the /dev/ directory?

Thanks in advance for helping this linux n00b.

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How are you doing the copy? You should be using the backup option or -dpR (something like that, check the help on cp).

N3ural wrote:I'm currently trying to install gentoox natively as discussed in another post here, but I've had one big hangup.

How do I extract the contents of the rootfs file?

I've tried mounting it in KNOPPIX and copying the files out to a partition, but it always hangs up on the /dev/ directory, or some symlink somewhere. How do I get around this, and is it necessary to copy the /dev/ directory?

Thanks in advance for helping this linux n00b.

I'm not much of a linux expert myself, but I'm pretty sure you can't really copy the /dev directory because it's basically a list of what hardware is connected to the machine it's running on. Basically, it would be like trying to copy the harddrive itself, the DVD-ROM drive, the USB ports, etc. as a piece of data, which you can't really do, so just go ahead and skip copying the /dev directory.

You absolutely need the dev directory, otherwise you won't be able to use any hardware, which obviously will cause problems.

The /proc directory doesn't need to be copied, as this is mounted specially.

You can use cp to copy the /dev directory like so:

cp -dpR /dev /destination/dev/

In fact, using the -dpR option is best (AFAIK) for doing any copying like he is trying to do.