update 26.7.1 to 26.7.2 fails, no boot on legacy boot system after reboot [solved]

[knowHoff]

Good evening,

after doing the upgrade today from
26.7.1 to 26.7.2,
my system fails while trying to boot.
The only output I see is the one shown here

You cannot view this attachment.

I am able to access a boot prompt.
The only answer I get after typing "boot" is from gptboot, which is not applicable on a CSM / legacy boot system.

You cannot view this attachment.

Is there any possibility to recover the installation
or do I have to clean install?

Cheers

[cookiemonster]

It might just need to install the bootloader to the disk. Can you boot to a usb stick/live freebsd distro? Easier to use the native freeBSD tools not the linux ones for this case.
When booted to the live session, show the partitions on this disk.:
$gpart show

[knowHoff]

Thank you for taking the time to look at my problem.

This is the output of gpart show, please take a look at the picture.

You cannot view this attachment.

It seems that the partition table is still valid.

Do you know how to restore the bootloader on  BSD?

[knowHoff]

I've been reading through BSD forum and found this

So I just tried to switch the Bios setting from legacy to UEFI.
The system is booting now, but is not able to finish the booting process.

It stops here:

You cannot view this attachment.

Is it possible that there is a fault in the upgrade process that just overwrites legacy boot with UEFI boot?

Cheers

[Patrick M. Hausen]

OPNsense has been installing both legacy and EFI boot side by side for years. This is also the default in the standard FreeBSD installer.

I would do a clean reinstall. Something in your file system is severly broken.

If you have the time boot a live system and make sure (SMART, dd) the target drive passes at least basic tests.

If you must have this system up again, e.g. to copy the configuration file, drop to a shell and try "fsck -y".

[knowHoff]

I have done SMART tests and the harddrive / ssd passed successfully.
I've also fsck'd the drive using GhostBSD live medium. fsck found errors. I did let fsck correct the found errors automatically but it didn't help.

It is also worth mentioning that this is / was a clean install, just two weeks old, since my upgrade from 26.1 to 26.7 failed the webUI way so I was forced to do a clean install to jump up to 26.7.

Right now, the ssd is being wiped and getting a clean install.

Thanks again for your help!

Cheers

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Install with ZFS while you are at it.

[knowHoff]

thanks for that hint.
are there benefits on single disk system when using zfs over ufs?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Much better resilience concerning unclean shutdown. No fsck. Checksums of all data and metadata - if a file gets corrupted due to drive error, you know! Snapshots and rollback!

ZFS is the single best storage technology out there. Seriously. Sun Microsystems put millions of dollars into it back in the days.

[knowHoff]

I thought that checksumming and snapshotting is only available on multiple disk systems / RAIDZx.
Thanks for pointing that out!
Just starting the installation now utilizing  ZFS.

Cheers

[Patrick M. Hausen]

RAIDZx or mirrors just add redundancy in case of drive failures. All other features are exactly the same regardless of the pool topology.

[knowHoff]

thank you for the info and time taken to teach / spread knowledge.
highly appreciated!

Cheers