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Zmann

Member

Registered: 2010-04-27

Posts: 43

System not usable after update: /usr symlink causes trouble

Hi all,

two days ago an update (pacman -Su) left my system in an unusable state: no network, no keyboard, no mouse. The reason is probably that my /usr directory was simply a symbolic link to a directory on a different partition. This different partition is located on my SSD where I tried to put the "big" applications like Firefox or Libre Office. So I simply symlinked /opt and /usr and that worked well - up to now.

I assume that the efforts regarding the mounting of /usr early in the boot process broke my system. To get my system up again I simply booted into a live system and copied the content from the symlinked /usr to /usr and the system was okay. Nevertheless I would like to stick with my concept of putting arbitray stuff to my SSD. Is there a way to ensure that the partition on the SSD is available at boottime? Then I might even shift /lib, /bin and /sbin to the SSD?

I could also put the whole root file system to SSD, but I confess I'm somewhat unsure about those "do not write too often or it will die"-issues that can be found on the net. Of course, simply symlinking some directories offers a nice flexibility to put exactly the stuff I want to SSD, but if that causes too much trouble I could also live with putting the whole root file system there.

Anyway, if anyone can give me some advice how to use the SSD in my system, I would really appreciate that.

Thanks in advance, Zmann

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,424

Website

Re: System not usable after update: /usr symlink causes trouble

This post to the ML details putting /usr on a separate partition http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/ … 24124.html

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Zmann

Member

Registered: 2010-04-27

Posts: 43

Re: System not usable after update: /usr symlink causes trouble

Meanwhile I simply put my whole root filesystem to SSD to circumvent this problem. Nevertheless I will not mark this thread as solved, since this issue still exists.

Cheers, Zmann