Re: Unable to boot after update from within auto-admin

Have I chosen the right mailing list for this question?
On Thursday, May 7th, 2026 at 5:32 AM, linuxblood <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi, I'm very new to FreeBSD.
>
> Everything was working fine on my (desktop) system for a few days when I received a popup notification from within Openbox that updates were ready. I was skeptical so I closed the popup box and it said I could run 'auto-admin' at any time. I tried running auto-admin after logging out of Openbox and user session, logged in as root, selected the update option from the menu, it ran it, I accepted the reboot option, and I cannot boot into my system.
>
> I'm running FreeBSD 15, on an old laptop with old BIOS. (from 2010 or thereabouts) I'm not compiling software, just using snapshot packages as selected during the install. I used the guided disk installer option. My system was up-to-date as far as I know prior to this.
>
> Up to this point I'd been updating my system with pkg update then pkg upgrade and it's been smooth, but this popup led me to an update process in auto-admin which hosed my system.
>
> Here are the error messages at boot, after I enter my encryption pass:
>
> ---
> Can't find /boot/zfsloader
> Can't find /boot/loader
>
> zio_read error: 5
> zio_read error: 5
> zfs: i/o error - all block copies unavailable
> zfs: can't read object set for dataset 388
> zfs: can't open root filesystem
> can't find /boot/kernel/kernel
>
> freebsd/x86 boot
> default:zfs:zroot/ROOT/default:/boot/kernel/kernel
> boot:
> ---
> I searched the web for instructions, and came upon something which I tried:
>
> - Boot from FreeBSD 15 LiveDVD
>
> - Choose Single User and login as root
>
> - gpart show
>
> - gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptzfsboot -i 1 ada0
>
> (after using gpart show -l and gpart -p to verify freebsd-boot location)
>
> It displayed the text that it was written and I rebooted and the system still throws up the errors after entering my encryption password.
>
> I don't know what else to do at this point other than a complete reinstall, which would be a hard lesson to learn as I haven't saved any backups of personal files. I didn't expect this would hose my system. Was I correct to run the update as suggested via auto-admin then reboot? Is this type of popup notification normal?
>
> I'm quite the BSD newbie. I tried to research this and fix it myself but.. I failed.
>
> Is there any way to salvage the installation at this point?