Re: 13.3R's installworld killed system--please help!

>       And so I still have no clue what destroyed my system's ability to boot
> except that it appears to have happened as part of "make installworld".  I
> also still have no idea how to fix it. :-(


...and fixing it is the important bit. This is old enough that its using 
BIOS and MBR boot, yes ? What do you have that you can actually boot 
into on the machine which would let you access the discs ? I understand 
that a USB stick doesn't work, but do you have a CD drive maybe you 
could use to boot it ?

What I would try, assuming you can get access to the discs, it to 
rewrite both the boot sector and the boot partition. I got bitten by 
this once, and since then I have a little script which I run after every 
update which does this:


$ cat /root/update_boot_blocks
#!/bin/sh
for DRIVE in ada0 ada1
do
     /sbin/gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 ${DRIVE}
done

That's specific to my disc layout of course. But the point is I make 
sure I always update both the MBR and the boot partition which goes away 
to find the zpool I boot from. So, obviously you cant do directly that 
if you cant boot the machine - but if you can boot some kind of FreeBSD 
from a CD you have (I think you said you couldnt burn a new one, but do 
you have an older version lying around?) then you could boot that, 
download the latest pmbr and gptzfsboot files from the internet, and 
write them to the discs.


This is what I ended up having to do when I got into a similarly 
unbootable state a few years ago. Mine was slightly easier than yours 
though, as I could boot form a USB stick.


-pete.