Step 2 - Preparing the disks

Once our Internet connection functional, it is time to prepare our disks for the installation. Use the fdisk -l command to identify the correct drive to prepare and format. If it is a SATA drive the identifier should be of type /dev/sdX, and if it is a NVMe drive the identifier should be of type /dev/nvmeXn1.

Once your correct drive identified, we will create on this drive a new partition table. Run fdisk on the drive, if we take the example of /dev/nvme0n1, we would have:

Once in fdisk, enter "g" first to create a new GPT partition scheme, and then enter w to write the new partition table and exit fdisk.

Creating the partition layout

Now, for the partitions, we will use cgdisk:

We will create 3 partitions for our new Gentoo installation. Here is a table showing the partitions you need:

Once the partitions created, do not forget to Write the changes to the disk before leaving cgdisk. Here is a screenshot of what the partition layout should look like in cgdisk:

Formatting the partitions

It is now time to create the filesystems on our partitions. Let's start with the EFI partition:

Now, the swap partition:

And finally, the root partition:

Mounting the partitions

After formatting our partitions it is time to proceed with the mountpoints. Let's start with the easiest, mounting the swap partition:

Then we will temporarily mount our root partition so we can create on it two BTRFS subvolumes, before unmounting it:

Creating the subvolumes:

We unmount (temporarily) the partition...

...Before remounting it properly using the subvolumes:

Now let's create the missing mountpoints:

And now we can mount our other BTRFS subvolume...:

...And our EFI system partition:

Once done, we check using the lsblk command that we have properly mounted all of our partitions, before proceeding with the next step. Here is a screenshot of the mountpoints: