When booting, the livecd fails to start many services (including network) due to /var/run being a symlink to /run, but /run not existing as a directory on the livecd image. The first thing that fails is mkdir /var/run (file exists), but many other services fail to start. As a workaround, after I get a shell on the livecd (which does work for me), I can run: mkdir /var rc default And everything comes up fine. Having to type this every time is, of course, somewhat inconvenient. Let me know if I can provide any more details to help diagnose this issue, although it appears straightforward from my perspective.
https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=421839
Thanks *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 421839 ***