On Wed, 25 Mar 1998, Christopher R. Bowman wrote:

> On Wed, 25 Mar 1998, Jym & Sharon Brittain wrote:
> 
> >I have followed the procedure for installation listed on both the MacBSD 
> >page and that which came with the 1.3 version. When I go to boot in 
> >single user mode to edit rc.conf, I get vi: vi not found. This happens 
> >with EVERY command when I use a seperate partition for /usr. Anyone else 
> >experience similar problems and have a solution? If I use a joint /root & 
> >usr partition it works fine.
> 
> The problem is that vi and all the other programs that you are trying that
> don't work live on the /usr partition which is not mounted in single user
> mode.  Thus you can't run them.  You will need to mount /usr and you will
> also need to mark the root partition as writeable since it is mounted
> read only in single user mode.

Only "/" is mounted (read-only) when you're in single user mode. The
reason is so that you can fsck all of the disk partitions correctly. It's
VERY unsafe to fsck a read/write mounted fs. A read-only one can be done
("/" in single user), and unmounted ones are no big deal.

I know it's a pain on the first install or when you want to do a lot in
single-user mode, but having only / mounted (and r/o at that) is a GOOD
thing when something's sick on the disk.

I've taken to not doing split root and /usr anymore. ;-)

Take care,

Bill