I have the unique pleasure of waiting as /usr is copied back to my Ubuntu SSD after offloading it to a sea of spinning rust to save some space. Surprise surprise Ubuntu keeps almost everything in /usr these days and it didnt boot :l but hey, at least BusyBox in initramfs has my back for times like these. Can i mount a specific ext4 directory with options? the issue seems to be my attempt at using a bind mount fails while running from the ramdisk, for whatever reason it wont mount my large data drive on /data
You didn’t mention why you’re trying to bind-mount your /data volume from your initramfs environment, but the only reason I can even guess at is that you’re trying to use it as part of your recovery environment. In which case, you’d probably be better served by doing the recovery from an Ubuntu live usb rather than try to cobble together a working environment from the shrapnel you left scattered across your drive.
This process should literally look like – boot, mount drives, rsync /usr back to root volume, clean up fstab/any other config changes, reboot, try again later after you’ve done more reading.
I’m surprised you can’t put /usr on a separate partition. Back in my SunOS days, we used to NFS mount /usr on all our workstations.
There was a movement to make /bin /sbin etc symlinks to /usr a few back. I honestly don’t remember the rationale, but here’s Debian’s page about the change: https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge. If I hadn’t been following the distros at the exact moment they did the changeover it probably would have thrown me for a loop too.
I think it had to do with the fact that these days relatively few people need /usr on a separate partiton and so it very rarely happens and something about system binaries being easier to manage if they’re actually all in one place. People are ready for some tweaks to the FHS, I guess.
You totally can, this is some weirdness in the mount order during boot and not having the disk available at the same path in the init ramdisk
Also, Ubuntu making bin a link to /usr/bin doesn’t help :P
Interestingly, when I added the bind mount to /usr the init environment failed when trying to set up the actual root fs because it was trying to bind mount from the init ramdisk filesystem paths into the new root path. im sure I could cloodge together a script to patch things up in the initrd but my days of straying from a sane upgrade path on Ubuntu are over (now I just do that on nixos because I don’t know what I’m doing)