Knowledge Base:Continuing after an interrupted installation

Synopsis
The Gentoo Linux installation method is a manual approach which can take some time to perform, especially if it is the first time you perform a Gentoo Linux installation. It is however possible to interrupt the installation and later continue, but you'll need to retake some vital steps.

Environment
This article is applicable to Gentoo Linux installations that have not finished yet.

Analysis
The Gentoo Linux installation uses a phased approach (roughly the chapters of the installation section in the Gentoo Handbook) which allows users to interrupt an installation and continue later. Of course, changes that were made already and that are persisted do not need to be reiterated again.

"Preparing the Disks" was not finished
If you have not finished section "4. Preparing the Disks" yet, you'll need to finish that first. If you have partitioned your disks but not put any file system on it, just continue from that step. There is no need to re-partition the disks at that point.

Make sure that the file systems are mounted before you continue:

"Preparing the Disks" was finished
If you did finish the section on preparing the disks, just remount the partitions:

Getting the chroot ready
The next steps in the Gentoo Installation is to prepare the chroot by downloading and extracting the proper files on the file systems. If you were in the middle of this process (i.e. "5. Installing the Gentoo Installation Files") just continue where you left off.

If you did finish this section as well as chapter "6. Installing the Gentoo Base System", section "Chrooting", you will need to remount the  and   locations and chroot:

Continuing where you left off
From the moment that you are chrooted, you can just continue from where you left off as all changes made since are persisted.

Further Resources

 * Recovering from a kernel boot failure on the Gentoo Wiki Knowledgebase uses a similar approach.