talking arch disk

[Chris Brannon]

> What has me puzzled 
> about the architecture of archlinux is the use of /mnt where files get 
> placed, yet mirror directories like /etc exist outside of /mnt.

Here's the deal with /mnt.
When you're booted from the CD, after you finish with the installer,
the root partition of your installed system should be mounted there.
If it isn't, you need to mount it there.
When you're booted from CD, files in /etc come from the CD.  Actually,
they're in a union filesystem.  It's a union of the CD's tree and
an in-memory filesystem, so you can write to it, as well as read from
it.  Once you have booted from hard drive, none of your system's files
will be under /mnt.  It's just a mount point.
Hope this is a clear explanation.

So you went through the install process?  Could you tell anything about
the system when it booted?

-- Chris