Solaris

I'm afraid that statement is a little late but /usr as a symbolic link is absolutely unsupported and will make your OS unusable.
/usr must be either part of the root filesystem (/) or a mountpoint for a dedicated filesystem.
Even if you manage to have a working system with hacks, package installation or patches will remove that link and break the OS again.

You are absolutely right on that.
I've also reverted the "usr"-link plan and doing an on-going restore attempt (since it's acting up a bit).

Should a reinstall be needed, it's just a question of burning a new Solaris ISO and starting over. However, I like playing a bit with it even though I am not super-experienced with Solaris, but I learn much more from this and from Scott's help than giving up and reinstalling the OS

Oh no, I forgot to come back to this. What jlliagre said was exactly why I was asking about the layout and saying that the way to do this was probably not as you would expect. I wanted to avoid the symbolic link, it really doesn't work.

If you haven't done the restore yet, or even if you have it is possible to move /usr without reinstalling. Can you let us know exactly where things are at right now?

Yes, it was never the intention to end up with /usr -> /export/usr.

That just kinda happened by accident along the way!

I repeated what brightstorm had done, on my Solaris, but was able to repair it. The problem now is that brightstorn has lost most of his /usr directory. And we're not quite sure where it went! (not sure an fsck will help as we've rebooted a couple of times along the way)

To sum up what have happened so far;

1. I mistakenly moved the entire /usr dir to /export/usr
2. /usr was replaced with a link (usr -> /export/usr)
3. Problems become obvious after reboot
4. Restore
4.1. Mount root: /etc/mount -o remount,rw /
4.2. Delete usr link: rm usr
4.3. Re-create /usr: mkdir /usr
4.4. Restore files: mv /export/usr/* /usr
5. Reboot reveals that not all data made it to /usr as Scott finds several differences in the data I provide as we go along.

Newest things have been to manually create a /usr/sbin directory and copy all files from /sbin to it to fix a startup error (startup was looking for /usr/sbin/fsck).

As it stands, it cannot mount /dev/fd, and Scott have been puzzling a bit with where the data could've gone