Freebsd 5.3 screw up.... deleted /lib/libc.so.5

[David Kirchner]

On 11/27/05, ebm <ebm-freebsd-stable at swervinghead.com> wrote:
> After I deleted this very valuable file I realized what I did.  Since I
> don't have a old boot disk laying around is my only option to upgrade to
> a newer version of freebsd?

Unfortunately after FreeBSD 4 all of the binaries needed to boot are
dynamically linked, so you are not going to be able to reboot the
server, and you're not going to want to log out.

There is still hope however -- the /rescue directory contains a
statically linked binary and a whole bunch of hardlinks, including
'mount' and 'cp'. If you can get libc.so.5 onto a floppy somewhere
else you may be able to copy it into place with these utilities.

http://dpk.net/libc.so.5

That's a copy of libc from a FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE-p5 system.

Alternately, you could try installing the minimum binary package as
suggested by Michael (however you'll need to use /stand/sysinstall
since it is static)