Recovering from a late "make installworld" failure?

[Juha Saarinen]

Again for the archives, I got out of the installworld mess caused by
an unknown error relatively simply. Booting into single mode was a
no-goer, but booting up with the 5.4-RELEASE CD and selecting "Upgrade
existing system" in the sysinstall menu was.

I selected the minimal "User" option (binaries and docs) and mounted
/, /var, /tmp and /usr but not /home in the disk editor. The installer
did its thing and all was copacetic after rebooting - 5.4-RELEASE
installed.

Before that, I backed up everything with /rescue/tar and copied it to
a safe place, just in case.

-- 

Juha