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

On Monday, May 11th, 2026 at 12:35 AM, Jason Bacon <[email protected]> wrote:

[...]
> The auto-upgrade-base script (which does not yet do anything with
> pkgbase), would pose a slightly higher risk, but also merely automates
> the same commands the user would run by hand (freebsd-update upgrade,
> freebsd-update install, reboot, freebsd-update install).
> 
> I've been using both these tools for many years (auto-upgrade-base
> probably 100 times, auto-update-system thousands of times) and never
> experienced an unbootable system following their use.  In fact, I can't
> actually recall a FreeBSD system ever becoming unbootable following an
> upgrade, even before I created these tools.
> 
> Only freebsd-update and pkg upgrade with pkgbase have the potential to
> lead to an unbootable system, and that's highly unlikely if the
> pre-update system was clean.
> 
> I would look for a hardware issue, or some sort of pre-existing system
> corruption caused by other activities before the update.

Hi Jason. I appreciate your kind, highly detailed and informative post, thank you. :) And thank you for making auto-update. When I saw the menu prior to updating with it, it looked like a very feature rich program, I just had a bad experience with it. I'm a newbie after all.

I chose to install 'packages' vs. 'distribution' on my FreeBSD 15 install, and had been updating my system using 'pkg update' followed by 'pkg upgrade' without issues. The freebsd-update fetch & install options are not available to me, as they say on the command line output when I try and use them.

When I ran the update option (#1?) from the list in auto-update, the screen flew by with operations which included some removal of some packages. I didn't have the chance to read because it went by so quickly. I still have the drive in it's non functional state if anyone wants to try and help me resurrect it. I have little interest in doing so at this point however, since I installed fresh to another drive.

Perhaps if I had installed distribution instead of packages it would've made a difference, I don't know.

The hardware is fine, though I was admittedly using a USB flash drive for the install, which I've used tons of times for Linux without issue.

As for "other activities before the update" I was simply in Openbox with Firefox -current version- loaded and the popup came as a small box with a question mark inside and a message about updates. Rather than confirm as the popup was strange, I closed it and performed the update after exiting everything for the user and logging in again as root. Again, the install was encrypted and encrypted swap, if that makes a difference, using the guided disk partitioning option.

What concerns me is, many new users are using the 'desktop-installer' package to install their new desktop for the first time, and it pulls in 'auto-update' along with two other packages, one being some kind of notification program. A new user such as myself when greeted with this information may succumb to the same problem I experienced so I wanted to warn others about this since the popup was quite jarring as well as unusual and confusing. I never knew about the 'auto-update' program and a quick search on the net prior to executing it seemed to check out alright.

I wouldn't know what further to add unless someone is interested enough in the logs and wants to help me revive the drive to a working state; enough to fetch the logs.

I'm loving FreeBSD and the community, thank you.