Mounting /etc and /sbin outside the root partition ?

[ballans]

Hello everybody,
I'm planning to upgrade my server from HP-UX 11iv1 to 11iv2.
On the / partition, only 135 MB are available and, when I run update-ux
(# /usr/sbin/update-ux -s /cdrom HPUX11i-OE)
so there is an error message :
ERROR: To perform this OS update, it is required that the / partition have at least 200000 KB of free space and it currently has 135048 KB of free space.

On the / mount partition, sbin uses 37 MB and etc uses 53MB.
I red a lot of articles on how to extend the root partition (in general, the best one is to reinstall or recover the system), but, nowhere I found a response to this question :
is it possible to mount /etc and /sbin in a different mount point than / ?

If I made this new mount points, so my / partition will use only 20 MB and so it should be OK for performing an upgrade.

Your advices ?
Thanks in advance for you replies.

Herve

[Ninad_1 · Accepted solution]

It is not possible (technically) to have etc and sbin as seperate filesystems.
All the system executables and startup scripts required during boot are stored in /sbin and all system configuration files in /etc - even the fstab file which tell which filesystems to mount is inside etc :)

So NO is the answer.

Regards,
Ninad

[Jeff_Traigle]

Something to check... If you aren't using VxVM for volume management, you can swremove Base-VXVM and free up quite a bit of space from /.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

You are better off rebuilding the system prior to upgrade-ux with make_tape_recovery (Ignite) or make_net_re covery

Then you boot of the media, intervene and make root fs bigger.

Better yet is to avoid upgrade-ux at all, because it is classically unreliable.

Your solution to mount /etc /sbin externally will not yield you any disk space, even if you could do it.

You may have a stray file lying around.

cd /etc
du -k | sort -rn | more
cd /sbin
du -k | sort -rn | more


SEP

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Yes, it is certainly possible to move these directories outside /; however, I strongly suspect that you would prefer to have a bootable machine when you are done. If you can tolerate a non-bootable machine then by all means move these directories otherwise the answer is no.

[ballans]

OK, thanks for your great advices : the answer is no...and I prefer to keep a bootable machine :-)
Herve