Cannot cp the bzImage. Help plz first time compiling kernel
 

this is my first time trying to compile the kernel myself. Im using Gentoo. When i try

livecd linux # ls arch/i386/boot/bzImage
arch/i386/boot/bzImage

livecd linux# cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/linux-2.6.7-gentoo
cp: cannot create regular file '/boot/linux-2.6.7-gentoo' : No such file or directory.

Does anyone know what i need to do? Im logged in as root. i get the same error if i try to mkdir in /boot

Does /boot exist and is it writable? Can you post the output from:
ls -l /
mount

its there this is what i get with

livecd /# ls -l


dr-xr-xr-x 42root root 0 Jul 19 07:38 boot


livecd /# mount
warning can't open /etc/mtab: No such file or directory

Try to post "cat /proc/mounts"

I have been playing with gentoo for about 2 months,it is something else,one thing I know you need to do is make your /ect/fstab,good luck I play around with it when I want to beat myself up.

It looks as if you are unable to write to /boot at this time. You probably should do a chmod 7?? ... I dont know what the appropriate setting is. Maybe 755. Just make sure that when you ls -lah /boot you see that root has permission to write to the directory ie drwx and not dr-x. That should solve your problem.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but the prompts given have "livecd" in them. That's an awfully weird username or system name... unless of course the system is running off a CD-based distribution. Live CDs run in a read-only filesystem, which also seems to make sense.

If you are running in a CD-based version of Linux, then you probably shouldn't be compiling a kernel anyway. There are at least two problems with this:
1. The filesystem is read-only; even if you made it read-write, the whole filesystem is in RAM, and it would not survive a reboot. You could never test your new kernel.
2. Even if you mounted your /boot filesystem as read/write, chances are good the files on your hard drive and the ones on CD are different. Compiling a kernel with the CD's system files & environment and placing it on your hard disk probably will not work

If your doing this for practice, then consider the attempt successful. You will only be able to finish the installation running on your normal setup (i.e. not from a live CD).

If you are running from the hard drive, my mistake. It's just odd to see "livecd" and have a read-only /boot filesystem on a "normal" installation.

<edit>
I'm not familiar with Gentoo... If you compile the kernel as part of the install process, then point #2 no longer applies. In that case, you would need to copy bzImage to the mount point for you hard drive /boot filesystem; not the /boot that the Gentoo install CD uses.
</edit>