Problem w/ 6.0 -> 7.2 update

[Alex Stangl]

Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask these questions. I emailed
this to Colin Percival a few weeks ago and heard nothing back, so I
figured I'd ask here.

Alex

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Hi,

I tried to upgrade my system from 6.0-RELEASE to 7.2-RELEASE today,
using the procedure described on your blog page FreeBSD major version
upgrades:
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2007-11-11-freebsd-major-version-upgrade.html

I had previously pulled down the tarball of the updated freebsd-update
script, exploded it, compared the hash. Today I started a script to
capture the output, ran
$ sudo sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf -r 7.2-RELEASE
upgrade

and watched it pulled down files, helped it merge, etc., then hit
spacebar repeatedly as it went through printing a long list of files.

Next thing I knew, it had exited back to the shell prompt. I wasn't
expecting that, probably because I didn't read your page closely enough.
Anyhow, I ran the upgrade command a second time (I think that's OK?) and
it basically did the same thing, but this time I reread your
instructions and saw that I needed to follow up with:

$ sudo sh freebsd-update.sh -f freebsd-update.conf install

So I did that, and did a reboot when it told me to.

Reboot failed -- no kernel. I eventually recovered from this by booting
the the FreeBSD 6.0 install CD, going to shell prompt, mounting the root
filesystem and copying kernel and *.ko from the CD back into
/boot/kernel.

Then I started to look at what went wrong, looking through
freebsd-update.sh, trying to figure out what it does, and sure enough I
see, comparing INDEX-OLD and INDEX-NEW that it shows the kernel and *.ko
getting removed and not replaced (also I can see this reviewing the
script output of the long set of files add/removed/modified.)

At this point I am tempted to do a rollback before proceeding any
further, but am not sure if having copied the files manually back in to
/boot/kernel is going to cause problems with rollback.

It's also not clear to me whether using freebsd-update.sh is the right
approach for upgrading from 6.0-RELEASE to 7.2-RELEASE, or if I should
follow some alternate approach, like booting the 7.2 CD and doing a
binary upgrade from there?

Anyhow, if you can advise me on these issues of whether the rollback
should work OK and what approach you recommend to proceed, I'd
appreciate it. I'll be happy to send any files, including the script
output, if you like. It seems more efficient to ask you rather than to
continue digging deeper & deeper in the shell script and all its
accompanying patch files, etc.

Thanks,

Alex Stangl