upgrading from 10.0 to 10.3 problem

[Peter Lai]

> Hello. I tried to upgrade from 10.0-RELEASE: # freebsd-update -r 10.3-RELEASE upgrade
> ...
> # freebsd-update install
> ...
> # reboot
> ...
> # freebsd-update install
> Installing updates...Segmentation fault (core dumped)
> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
> Segmentation fault (core dumped) Now I have:
> # freebsd-version -ku
> 10.3-RELEASE-p4
> 10.0-RELEASE It's not looking good. How to fix? PS. In /var/log/messages I see "(gunzip), uid 0: exited on signal 11"
> And yes:
> # gunzip
> Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Hi Sergey:

I ran into this problem the week before you did:
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2016-July/085115.html
Because just about all of the binaries were trashed (including /lib,
/[s]bin, /usr/lib, /usr/[s]bin files were truncated to 0), I had to
/rescue/nc > base.txz (where I fetched base.txz from the ftp site in
the 10.3-RELEASE distribution), then /rescue/tar -zxvf base.txz into a
directory, then tar | tar each of /lib and so on to get my binaries
back (apparently /rescue does not have a statically compiled cpio).

After sending the above to the mailing list I went ahead and replaced
the kernel that the broken freebsd-update install installed with the
one from 10.3-RELEASE (from the distribution base.txz:boot/kernel),
which made the system entirely binary 10.3-RELEASE then I was able to
freebsd-update to FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE-p6 with no problems. Note that
the initial freebsd-update from 10.0 also severely trashed my /etc, I
had to restore master.passwd and friends! (many of /etc files were
also truncated to 0), even though the merge process seemed to complete
ok before the broken freebsd-update install.