Trying to move /usr

[Jerry McAllister]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 11:10:12AM -0400, Michael S wrote:

> Good morning everyone,
> 
> I am trying to migrate my /usr to a newly installed
> SCSI drive. Up until yesterday I had /, /var, /usr on
> a 5 Gig drive and my /home was on another 60 Gig
> drive, which was fine because it had no GUI and
> functioned mostly as a server.
> 
> Last night I added a third drive, with a capacity
> around 18G; since my other two drives are hard-wired
> in /boot/device.hints, there were no problems with
> device numbering. I wrote down the device name
> (/dev/da2) and proceeded to sysinstall to first create
> a FreeBSD partition and then the only slice within
> that partition. I named it /user.

You have that backwards.  You created one slice on the disk
and one partition within that slice.   Minor thing, but can
confuse communication.

> I then tarred up /usr
> Tar –cf  /user/usr.tar /usr
> 
> Extracted the tar file and moved everything one
> directory up, because otherwise everything were under
> /user/usr.
> 
> I made the necessary adjustnments in /etc/fstab, that
> is I switched /usr and /user around.

I am not completely sure just what you mean by 'moved one directory up' 
and 'switched /usr and /user around'.
It sounds an awful lot like you are saying you modified /etc/fstab to mount 
this new partition (probably  /dev/da2s1a, though the 'a' might be
something else) as /user instead of /user/usr.

But, the new partition needs to be mounted as /usr


> After reboot, I wasn’t getting the prompt, since the
> binaries for displaying the prompt are located under
> /usr/bin (or /usr/sbin?) and my guess was that /usr
> wasn’t mounting properly. I restarted the machine,
> this time going into single user mode. Trying to mount
> –a gave me an error message: Error mounting /usr/home.
> I then created home directory under the new /usr, I
> tried mount –a, this time it worked, but when I
> rebooted, I wasn’t getting my home directory. When I
> login as an unprivileged user – michael, the message
> is something like: “User has no home directory”.
> 
> For now I reverted to using the old /usr.
> 
> Anyone attempted to migrate /usr and fell for similar
> kind of problems? Any suggestions will be appreciated.
> 
> P.S. I am not next to that machine right now, so I
> can’t provide the exact fstab or dmesg output.

I guess we need the actual /etc/fstab to be sure just what
has been done.   Maybe also some dmesg output that shows the
disk devices could be useful too.

////jerry

> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Michael
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