It's been awhile since I played with gentoo-mips; however, the issue you are
running into has to do with the fact that the Gentoo-Mips livecd is not, in
fact, a true cd image. It is a HD image based on the Mips disc-layout
scheme. This is mentioned in the readme included with the image(iirc, it
also mentioned the build method for making the image, though not in any
detail), which I believe was worked out by kumba or redhatter (not sure
which one atm). If you really need help I suggest the #gentoo-mips channel
on FreeNode. Someone in there will have had experience with your Octane2
machine; Me, I'm an O2 man meself... :)



On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 6:12 AM, sébastien bertoletto
<sbertoletto@gmail.com>wrote:

> hi,
>
> We are a group composed of four students in engineer school and we work on
> a project which is to design a cluster with SGI machines. We would like to
> install Gentoo on our machines (SGI Octane 2 MIPS) but we have many
> problems. Indeed, we need to modify the image disk of the live CD in order
> to insert some software like GCC, Mpich (because when we try to install
> Gentoo on the computer we have no x64 compiler on the live-cd and the
> installation by portage fail so it is impossible to compile the kernel)...
> We would like you help to understand how to mount the live cd image, it does
> not seems to be a standart format. Could you help us to do that ? If you are
> interesting to have the new live-cd we will create we will find a way to
> transmit it to you.
>
> Yours sincerly,
>