[gentoo-amd64] e2fsprogs-libs liblkid.so.1 broken system

[Daiajo Tibdixious]

2 days ago I did
  emerge --sync
  emerge -aDuv system

which blocked on (I'm going from memory here, my system is down &
unbootable except off CD):
  sys-libs/ss
  sys-libs/ something else
  something/e2fsprogs-libs

I have auto packages built for everything, so figured it was safe to
emerge -C the 3 offending packages.
I did that & found all of them are critical.
I then restored the first 2 from package with any problem.

However I have no package for esfsprogs-libs & emerge --sysnc & much
else in portage does not work.
In particular mount & some other critical tools are non-functional.
One particular critical missing library is liblkid.so.1, which I
believe is part of e2fsprogs-libs

Note e2fsprogs-libs is blocking a later version of itself.

I booted off the live CD, did all the bits up to chrooting, however
after chrooting I can't emerge --sync, can't mount, can't resove DNS
names, etc,
so I'm stuffed. So I need to fix my system before chrooting to it &
I'm at a loss as to what to do.

I'm familar to manually downloading tar balls & installing from them,
however I don't know how to do an emerge --sync
without chrooting first.

Also e2fsprogs-libs tarbal is already downloaded, however portage will
not install it, as the 3 offending packages are still blockers.
Thats why I want to emerge --sync in the hopes that the dependencies
have been made into something rational, as I could see
no way around the blockages.

P.S. there is a step in the installation handbook to
  cp -L /etc/resolve.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc
however I have no resolve.conf. I think this is why I have no DNS
after chrooting.
My CD is several years old and I have downloaded a 2008.0-r1 minimal ISO.
However I'm using a windows XP system with a broken Nero burning S/W
and this may take a while to fix.