By: Kim 9th May, 2025
systemd-boot is broken
Upon finally migrating my PC to Arch Linux, I used the same drive structure I’ve been using with Mint/Ubuntu etc. and that is having /usr on sdb1 while the main root file system was on /sdc2.
In the past, this worked flawlessly, but with migrating to Arch, I’ve ditch Grub in favor of the default systemd-boot. Didn’t notice any issues on my laptops or a couple of other desktops that have / and /usr on the same filesystem.
I did however run into an issue with my desktop. I have opted to have / and /usr on two separate drives due to the primary boot drive (SSD) being 256GB and I have a 500GB HDD which I used for the /usr file system.
well, I kept getting the following error after installing Arch.
ERROR: Boot device mounted successfully, but /sbin/init does not exist. Bailing out, you are on your own. Good luck.sh: can't access tty; job control turned off.
and a[rootfs ]#prompt.
It seems, systemd has a severe issue with /usr if it’s not pre-mounted. I’m going to have to do some digging to figure out if pre-mounting is possible. Source: https://systemd.io/SEPARATE_USR_IS_BROKEN/
I’m assuming if I went with Grub this wouldn’t have been an issue, and maybe I’ll try this with Grub on my sandbox laptop to confirm.
But for now, /usr and / are both residing on /dev/sdc2 and everything is working as it should.
I have given /sdb1 to /opt, which in hindsight probably isn’t a bad thing as it is where the yay/aur packages are being installed too, so they’re not residing on my smaller SDD.
Two servers to migrate off the Ubuntu ecosystem and my network will be Windows & Ubuntu free.