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

On 2026-05-08 17:20, linuxblood wrote:
> 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?

Have you tried reading the pool from the live-system?