Please note attempting to mitigate this by switching back to upstart failed as well.
Doing so did make it so the system would boot past mounting /usr however for no obvious reason the system stopped automatically mounting the /var partition. With no network services running, the system would stop the boot process on a screen and complain /var hadn't mounted and prompt me to press m to enter emergency mode. Once I did that and logged in, /var was in fact not mounted and a mount -av would immediately mount it and then exiting emergency mode would cause a normal boot to complete. This should be a blocking issue for 16.04 as it will cause a lot of grief to end users when servers fail during upgrades. If I didn't have an IPMI remote console device I would have been really stuck. To be clear the only fix that worked was connecting using an IPMI remote console device, booting my server from a rescue iso, taring up each of my partitions with tar cpf and dumping them on a disk outside my raid array. I then wiped all the partitions off my main raid array and switched to a configurations where I had 1 primary boot, 1 primary swap and a root and home partition in a LVM physical volume. I then formated boot ext2, root btrfs and home xfs and extracted all the tars. I then follow a process similar to the one below to reinstall grub: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Installing#via_ChRoot At the end of the process, inside the chroot, I also did an: update-initramfs -u The result was a working system but was way way more effort than should have been required. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to systemd in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1460794 Title: systemd will not work with a separate /usr partition Status in systemd package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: I recently upgraded a server from 14.10 to 15.04. The upgrade claim to have worked but the system could not boot afterwards. Basically when you attempt to reboot you end up at an emergency maintenance prompt early in the boot process. After a lot of digging one of the messages in the logs gives: systemd[1]: /usr appears to be on its own filesystem and is not already mounted. This is not a supported setup. Some things will probably break (sometimes even silently) in mysterious ways. Consult http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken Basically systemd cannot deal with /usr being on a separate partition. That needs to be fixed or systemd should not be used for upgrades with a separate /usr partition. This is related to bug 1460790 but asking for systemd to actually be fixed. Please see bug 1460790 if you are looking for a work around on this issue. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.04 Package: systemd 219-7ubuntu5 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.19.0-18.18-generic 3.19.6 Uname: Linux 3.19.0-18-generic x86_64 ApportVersion: 2.17.2-0ubuntu1.1 Architecture: amd64 Date: Mon Jun 1 15:29:32 2015 InstallationDate: Installed on 2010-05-23 (1835 days ago) InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Server 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release amd64 (20100427) MachineType: Supermicro X8STi ProcEnviron: TERM=xterm PATH=(custom, no user) XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set> LANG=en_CA.UTF-8 SHELL=/bin/tcsh ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.19.0-18-generic root=UUID=676235cd-93b1-426e-8336-fa0078d96145 ro quiet acpi=off pci=noacpi SourcePackage: systemd UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to vivid on 2015-06-01 (0 days ago) dmi.bios.date: 09/17/10 dmi.bios.vendor: American Megatrends Inc. dmi.bios.version: 2.0 dmi.board.asset.tag: To Be Filled By O.E.M. dmi.board.name: X8STi dmi.board.vendor: Supermicro dmi.board.version: 1234567890 dmi.chassis.asset.tag: To Be Filled By O.E.M. dmi.chassis.type: 3 dmi.chassis.vendor: Supermicro dmi.chassis.version: 1234567890 dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnAmericanMegatrendsInc.:bvr2.0:bd09/17/10:svnSupermicro:pnX8STi:pvr1234567890:rvnSupermicro:rnX8STi:rvr1234567890:cvnSupermicro:ct3:cvr1234567890: dmi.product.name: X8STi dmi.product.version: 1234567890 dmi.sys.vendor: Supermicro To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1460794/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp