SuSE 8.2, 640MHz Athlon, 192mb ram, 10Gb hd.
I used cfdisk & mke2fs to create hda3, then rebooted, only to get these messages.

linux:/home/tyccea # fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 10.2 GB, 10262568960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1247 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 624 5012248+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 625 668 353430 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda3 669 1247 4650817+ 83 Linux

linux:/home/tyccea # cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda1 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hda2 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0
/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom /media/cdrom auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto noauto,user,sync 0 0

linux:/home/tyccea # export /dev/hda3 /mnt/lfs
bash: export: `/dev/hda3': not a valid identifier
bash: export: `/mnt/lfs': not a valid identifier

linux:/home/tyccea # mount /dev/hda3
mount: can't find /dev/hda3 in /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

linux:/home/tyccea # mount -t ext2 /dev/hda3 /mnt/lfs
mount: /dev/hda3 already mounted or /mnt/lfs busy
mount: according to mtab, /dev/hda3 is already mounted on /mnt/lfs

What am I not understanding here? Do I simply need to add the partition manually to fstab? TIA.

Yeah - you add it. fstab doesn't read the partition table - fstab is read by other tools. If you issued the 'mount' command - 'mnt /dev/hda3 /mnt/new_partition' it would show in /etc/mtab, as that's a dynamic file. (Though, with it not being in fstab, you'd probably have to supply a lot more options. Fstab defines a lot of the options such a fstype.)

Thanks. I'm looking around for the proper way to put the entry in fstab, and tried this after reading man fstab:
/dev/hda3 /mnt/lfs ext2 defaults 1 1

I can call directory just fine; it already contains the lost+found folder. So I'm off to download the packages! Thanks again.

Make SURE you have dev and exec rights...it might not hurt to have user on there either.

/dev/hda3 /mnt/lfs ext2 defaults,dev,exec,user 1 1

user: so a non-root user can mount/umout it
exec: so you can execute ./ on it
dev: so when you create the devices (like /dev/null) it doesnt error...

In fact, this is the entry I used, successfully:

/dev/hda5 /mnt/lfs ext2 defaults,users,exec,dev,rw 1 2