Reinstall without reformat

[Michael Sierchio]

The brutal and brute-force approach can work - better if you boot from
a USB stick, of course. You can untar base.tzx and kernel.tzx in your
/, with filesystems mounted.  As Polytropon says, do a backup of what
you'll want afterwards.

This approach will leave a lot of cruft (old versions of shared
libraries, etc.), but will certainly work.  Grab the distribution from

(in this case, the example is for 9.2, i386)

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/i386/9.2-RELEASE