Newbie Question About System Update

[Bill Moran]

Jim Campbell <jim-c at charter.net> wrote:

> I've been away from *NIX a few years.  I have been playing with FreeBSD 
> for a week or so now with mixed results.  I am using release 4.11 
> because for some reason 5.3 has problems seeing my hard drives.  4.11, 
> Red Hat Linux and NetBSD have no such trouble.
> 
> This afternoon I used the "Updating Sources with CVSup" in the FreeBSD 
> Cheat Sheets and everything worked as advertized.  I believe that it 
> advised against using "make world" and suggested that I use "19.4.1 The 
> Canonical Way to Update Your System" in the Handbook.  I went through 
> the following steps with no problem:
> 
>  # make buildworld
>  # make installworld
>  # mergemaster
>  # reboot

This is not correct, and this is not what 19.4.1 says.  The correct
procedure is as Mike Schultz described.  Please review that section of
the handbook.

If you did, indeed, do as you described, then you have a world that's
out of sync with your kernel.  Try this:
1) Boot in to single user mode
2) fsck
3) mount -a
4) cd /usr/src
5) make buildkernel
6) make installkernel
7) reboot

If you're unable to complete those steps, then you may be better off
reinstalling and trying again - write it off as part of the learning
process.  There are ways to restore your system if you've made this
mistake and the above doesn't work, but it's rather advanced stuff.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com