Hello,

I am currently using Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64.

During the installation process I set the "/usr" mount point to a partition in another hard drive (/dev/sdf1). I am noticing that I am getting an increasing count of bad sectors (44 so far) in this drive and need to replace it soon. So far I have not lost any data but I would like to reset this mount point to its default place with the "/" root hard drive (/dev/sdd1). What is the easiest way of doing this without having to reinstall my OS?

Thanks!

You could do it as a two step process.

1) create a temporary folder in /mnt (for example: mkdir /mnt/usr). Then use cp -R or use tar to copy the contents of /usr to /mnt/usr.

2) umount /usr. After unmountint /usr, if you run 'ls /usr', you should see an empty directory(under /usr in the root directory tree). Now "mv /mnt/usr/* /usr/*" to move the contents of the temporary directory to /usr.

At this point you have copied the contents of the /usr partition to /usr under the root of the filesystem. Edit /etc/fstab to remove the reference to /usr.

You still have /usr files on the other patition, which you can now safely delete.

2 members found this post helpful.

i think that should be done from minimal boot level, with no processes running from /usr.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you very much bigrigdriver.

It worked great with your steps but had to do an additional step before step 2: I changed to supersuser with 'su' before doing the unmount (which had to be forced) so that I would not cripple myself when trying to move the files.

By the way in case anyone out there finds this thread looking for the same solution:

The exact 'cp' command referenced to above is as follows (this needs to done like this in order to preserve all file permissions, attributes, etc.):

(the -v (verbose mode, to show you what's going on) is optional)
(the asterisk at the end is to copy the contents and not the directory)

# cp -v -r --preserve=all /path_to_source_directory/* /path_to_destination_directory

For changing to superuser, (if the root password is not set, it can be set by running this command: 'sudo passwd'):

$ su

For unmounting (the -l is to force the unmount):

# umount -l /name_of_mount