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Date:      Mon, 16 Sep 2024 23:39:53 +0100
From:      Pete French <pete@twisted.org.uk>
To:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: 13.3R's installworld killed system--please help!
Message-ID:  <f0d5282b-e44d-4c5e-88e1-65f89aef9fca@twisted.org.uk>
In-Reply-To: <202409150523.48F5NNVj003365@sdf.org>
References:  <202409150523.48F5NNVj003365@sdf.org>

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On 15/09/2024 06:23, Scott Bennett wrote:

>       Thank you very much for this suggestion!  It hadn't crossed my mind,
> likely because I thought I had thrown all those old CD-Rs and DVD+/-Rs away
> when I moved to a different apartment in February.  After seeing your message,
> though, I went looking.  In the very first place I checked, lo and behold, I
> found a DVD-R I had labeled "PC-BSD 8.2 (64-bit) Installer, LiveCD, and Repair
> Disk" and "PCBSD8.2-x64-DVD.iso Disk 1 of 1". 8-D  So I then did as you
> suggested.  Unfortunately, it made no change in the resulting boot behavior.
> :-(  At least I now know I have such a disk at hand to try such things.

Am gald you found the disc - I was also going to say that I am quite
happy to burn one for you and post it, though thats a slow method of
acquiring a CD! I remember posting someone in the US a copy of Minix
on 5.25 floppies back in 1989, and it took a while to get there, but
did indeed boot on arrival.

Am dissapointed that the updated boot sectors didnt help though. I
would have bet money on that being the issue (and lost the bet!)


>       Thank you both for that reassuring information.  After all this, it is
> now clear that the boot code was not the problem and that I *still* have no
> idea what went wrong.  I do not remember ever having an upgrade from source
> actually fail before this experience.  Even the trickiest one many years ago--
> a merged procedure to upgrade from i386 to amd64 in place and from, I *think*,
> 9.x to 10.x, went well.  (Trust me, I was as nervous as I would be on a
> non-precision approach in nighttime IMC in a non-radar, mountainous environment
> with flashes of light around me (yes, that happened to me once), but I had
> planned all the steps carefully, and my combined procedure was successful.)

!!!! umm, yeah, I really would not like to try that! not that I would,
never having got an IMC rating, but the little bits I did with foggles
on convinced me that this was not the kind of flying I wanted to do ;)


i386 -> amd64, however, I did that, and that worked fine, despite also
being very nervous. I;ve only ever done source upgrades, going right
back to FreeBSD 3, and the only times it failed to boot were when I
forgot to upgrade the boot code for a newer ZFS pool.


> rolled every file system back to that snapshot.  After reinserting the drives
> into the tower, I booted it and ... my 12.4-RELEASE-p2 system was up and
> running again.  What a relief!

Aha! Fantastic!

OK, so, you rolled back the filesystems .... but left the boot code
intact ? So this is now running your old filesystems but booting
using the updated 14.2 code that you wrote using PC-BSD, yes ?

>       So I'm back to where I was before attempting the upgrade.  It's a good
> system, but it is out of support, so thank you very much to everyone who
> responded anyway.  I am pondering what my next step should be.


OK, I have forgotten the start of this thread, but you went from the
last version of 12 to a build of 13.0 release, which you compiled under
the installed 12?

How far did it get in the boot process - did it even find the pool and
try and load the kernel, or not even that far? If it is now booting off
the installed latest boot code, then we know it can run code which
should find the pool.

Do you have the 'bootfs' property set on the pool ?


This is a puzzle - I've done this repeatedly, going from 3 all the way
to 14, and its always worked.

-pete.



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