Você não deve hospedar /usr ou /etc em partições separadas. /etc em uma partição separada simplesmente não funcionará na maioria dos sistemas sem < href="http://blog.tuxopia.net.net/2010/03/booting-with-etc-in-separate-partition.html"> muito trabalho . Ter um /usr separado em máquinas Linux modernas parecerá funcionar, mas quebrará muitas funcionalidades, como systemd autor Lennart Poettering explica :
Most of the failures you will experience with /usr split off are graceful failures: they won't become directly visible, however certain features become unavailable due to these failures. Quite a number of programs these days hook themselves into the early boot process at various stages. A popular way to do this is for example via udev rules. The binaries called from these rules are sometimes located on /usr/bin, or link against libraries in /usr/lib, or use data files from /usr/share. If these rules fail udev will proceed with the next one, however later on applications will then not properly detect these udev devices or features of these devices. Here's a short, very in-comprehensive list of software we are aware of that currently is not able to provide the full set of functionality when /usr is split off: udev-pci-db/udev-usb-db and all rules depending on this (using the PCI/USB database in /usr/share), PulseAudio, NetworkManager, ModemManager, udisks, libatasmart, usb_modeswitch, gnome-color-manager, usbmuxd, ALSA, D-Bus, CUPS, Plymouth, the locale logic of most programs and a lot of other stuff.
/var e /home funcionam muito bem em suas próprias partições, e colocar o último em sua própria partição é altamente recomendado.