Using a recovery partition to repair a broken installation of FreeBSD

From: Graham Perrin <grahamperrin_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2025 01:58:58 UTC
On 17/08/2025 01:55, Graham Perrin wrote to freebsd-pkgbase:

> Subject: Using pkgbasify to repair a broken installation of FreeBSD 
> 14.3-RELEASE

> <https://gist.github.com/grahamperrin/9570092c127bd43777961b6f016e75ba> 


The routine is effective, to the best of my knowledge, however it's not 
particularly attractive. At least:

- the condensed steps will be too long for some users

- the first step assumes that the operator will have local access
   and a USB memory stick.

I love this response to the Foundation's recent Community Check-In:

 > … it would be nice to have something like 'recovery partition', as 
some OSes have. or at least some tiny fail-safe feature. having remote 
machine in some distant datacenter, booting from a flashstick is always 
a problem.

<https://witter.cz/@klokanek/115083259795252616>

An enhancement to bsdinstall could, before creation of the partition 
table, allow the user to specify an amount of space to be left free at 
the end of a device …