single user mode buildwerld failures

[Christian Walther]

On 04/04/07, KAYVEN RIESE <kayve at sfsu.edu> wrote:
> there were so many steps they didn't seem obvious.. i got halfway thru and
> realized i
> was in some prompt for mergemaster -p, or so i thought, so i started over.
> i had no
> idea what was happening.  i can't log on now.
> /etc/passwd is gone.  i used a freeBSD disk that is certainly old to go to
> a fixit shell but i didn't
> know what to do.  i can go back to the fixit shell if somebody tells me
> what to do but i have
> to *#@&ing walk over to kinkos now to get on the internet.

So firstly you should probably sit down and take a deep breath.

Secondly, it appears that you messed up your system pretty badly, I'm
not sure that it can be fixed. On the other hand, it just might be
that you missed a few steps.

For example, when you're in single user mode the root filesystem is
mounted read only, which means that you can't write to it. Anything
related to the upgrade process (installworld, mergemaster...) has to
fail.

Question is (sorry this isn't ment to sound harsch) if you read the
manual carefully, because it describes the entire process pretty
detailed. That is to say you have to read all the chapters, not only
the beginning.
For example it appears that you didn't remount the root filesystem
read/writeable after you booted to single user mode.

Passwords are not stored in /etc/passwd, there is /etc/pwd.db,
/etc/master.passwd and /etc/spwd.db, too. All are required for the
system to be fully functional. The latter two contain the passwords in
encrypted form. You might want to try to restore these files in
particular.

BTW: Your mailer appears to be broken. Some of your postings are
really difficult to read, it seems as if quoted postings aren't marked
properly, for example with a ">".