freebsd dead after attempt on upgrade from 6.2 to 6.3

[Derek Ragona]

At 03:02 PM 2/15/2008, Deian Popov wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I'm pretty stuck with the death of my bsd machine after attempt on upgrade
>from 6.2 to 6.3. Some time ago, I successfully upgraded from 6.1 to
>6.2following the steps in the manual
>
>1) cvsup source to specific release
>2) buildworld
>3) buildkernel
>4) installkernel
>5) boot
>6) mergemaster -p
>7) installworld
>8) mergemaster
>9) boot
>
>Now, after completing steps 1 to 5 the system won't boot and stucks at the
>following prompt
>
>bsd: Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad1s1a
>bsd: mountroot>
>
>the prompt has "?" command which shows available boot devices. The only
>device present there is my floppy (fd0)
>
>I can choose to boot to loader prompt but have no idea how to recorver, and
>more interesting, to figure out why that failure occurred?
>
>Any help is appreciated.

In some 6.x versions the upgrade can go south.  I had this happen on one 
server, and this is how I fixed it:

I downloaded and burned the release iso.  I booted the system from CD, then 
in sysinstall, I used the emergency shell.  In the emergency shell I 
mounted my drives and had a peek.  In my case I saw there was no 
kernel.  So I copied the kernel from the cd to my root / drive.  After that 
I could reboot from the hard drive, and finished my upgrade.

Hope this helps.

         -Derek

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