Failed update

[Richard Mahlerwein]

--- On Sun, 8/9/09, Richard Mahlerwein <mahlerrd at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Richard Mahlerwein <mahlerrd at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Failed update
> To: "FreeBSD-Questions" <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Date: Sunday, August 9, 2009, 10:23 AM
> In upgrading 7.1-PRELEASE to -stable,
> all seemed fine until I rebooted out of single user mode
> after doing make installworld and mergemaster.
> 
> Now I get to devd and it dies.  I've copied down
> what's on screen and typed it here.
> 
> ****
> [snip]
> starting devd.
> 
> Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode.
> cpu id = 0; apic id = 00
> fault virtual address = 0x3030313a
> fault code = supervisor write, page not present
> [snip]
> current process = 355 (devd)
> 
> ****
> 
> What critical step did I miss?  Single user mode seems
> OK, and I can mount the drives (though right now it'll tell
> me to fsck, since I just hard crashed).  I have not
> tried to cycle this thing much, for fear of trashing
> something further, but I did at least try one reboot. 
> Same issue.
> 
> (and yes, I'll be researching this myself, but I thought
> I'd get this message out there sooner rather than later...)
> 
> Rich Mahlerwein

I'm redoing the whole process in single user mode.  My guess is I goofed something during mergemaster and devd.conf is messed up.  (Mergemaster is, undeniably, my least favorite utility).  

I can suffer the system being down for a while, as long as my wife has access to a handful of files.  

How would I go about mounting a USB stick, if such can be done in single-user mode?  

I have several sitting around that I could copy stuff to (I'm sure that's easier than pulling off the backup I made last night, since the backup is in dump format on tape, and since my only bsd box is currently not working...)