# 'freebsd-update install' failed, /bin missing files



## enneff (Oct 18, 2018)

Hi,

I was just upgrading my system from 11.0-RELEASE to 11.2-RELEASE.
After rebooting with the new kernel I was running 'freebsd-update install' and it got interrupted somehow (my ssh connection was closed unexpectedly).

Now my /bin directory is only populated up to 'red' alphabetically, notably missing 'rm', and so running 'freebsd-update install' again yields many errors such as 'rm: command not found'.

Is there anything I can do to recover from this point?
I didn't realize freebsd-update could fail so spectacularly.

Thanks for any assistance.


----------



## SirDice (Oct 19, 2018)

enneff said:


> I didn't realize freebsd-update could fail so spectacularly.


It's not freebsd-update(8) that failed, but your SSH connection. That basically pulled the rug from underneath it. That's why you do things like this remotely using screen(1) or tmux(1). Especially if you have a bit of a dodgy  connection. 



enneff said:


> Is there anything I can do to recover from this point?


I'm not sure if this is fixable, are you able to boot a rescue disk? You might be able to extract the base.tgz over your installation. That would revert everything to a plain -RELEASE version but at least it'll work properly again. Then you can start the update procedure again.


----------



## enneff (Oct 25, 2018)

What I ended up doing is booting to a rescue disk, copying my config files (those that weren't wiped out) and user data to a separate drive, and re-installing the base system from scratch. It worked out okay.


----------

