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I have a Google Cr-48 notebook. The SSD only has 6 gb that I am comfortable allocating to Ubuntu. I need to move /usr to an external HDD. I also will move my /Home to another partition on the drive. I am going to specify the requirements that I must meet.

  1. I CANNOT install Ubuntu again
  2. I CANNOT use LiveUSB or LiveCD or LiveDVD
  3. I CANNOT boot the entire OS from the USB Drive
  4. I CANNOT do anything that requires GRUB (GRUB IS NOT INSTALLED OR UTILIZED, TRUST ME I AM CERTAIN)
  5. I CANNOT boot into Recovery Mode (reboot recovery or pressing button as both require GRUB) at all

I want to know if it can be done and how it can be done in detail. I have tried this many times. Each time something new went wrong.

I am asking for assistance on how to do something, I don't want anyone saying "moving the /usr directory is a bad idea" or anything of that nature. If I had another option that I felt comfortable with I wouldn't be asking this question.

Any assistance that anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated. I will provide more details in the future if requested/required. I am sorry for my pessimism, but after 5 re-installs my patience grows a little thin.

Thank you!

Marcus Hallett
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    Actually, it's not clear why do you think you need to move /usr from the root partition, especially if you're also moving /home. 6Gb should be enough to install the OS with all the bells and whistles. – Sergey Sep 16 '11 at 01:02

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Please read my response to your previous question - how to recover from mounting /usr/ nosuid - moving /usr to a mounted partition is not only "a bad idea" but is going to result in silent failures unless you also modify your initrd image, because /usr is expected to be available during the early boot process before any non-root partitions are mounted.

Apart from that, there are no major problems with moving /usr - all you need to do is

  • copy files from /usr to a separate partition
  • modify /etc/fstab
  • issue mount /dev/sdb1 /usr (where /dev/sdb is your "separate partition")

That's it, you should be using the new /usr now. Note that the files in your root /usr partition are not removed - this may require some trickery because /usr unavoidably becomes unavailable for a moment, but all commands required are located in /bin so it looks like it might work. Actually, I tried mounting /usr to a separate partition on a throw-away Virtualbox instance and it worked fine:

mkdir /usr.new
mount /dev/sdb1 /usr.new
cp -rp /usr/* /usr.new/
umount /usr.new
nano /etc/fstab # added a line /dev/sdb1 /usr ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0
mv /usr /usr.old
mkdir /usr
mount /usr
rm -rf /usr.old
sync # flush disk caches just in case it hangs up during the shutdown
reboot

And that should be it!

On my test box I found no issues with failing usev rules, but then again - it's a Virtualbox instance, YMMV.

UPDATE: I'm finding that sudo stopped working on that box, complaining on suid bit not set - this was caused by me using cp -r instead of cp -rp, as was suggested in the comments

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Sergey
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