# FreeBSD 13.0 to 13.1 upgrade issue



## jkmyers4 (Jul 20, 2022)

Super embarrassing for me to ask this, but for the first time since the 1990s that I have had an issue with upgrading FreeBSD that I can't figure out how to solve without asking.


The full transcript of everything from before deciding to upgrade until the upgrade failed is attached.

In a nutshell, I first ran freebsd-update like normal and then saw a warning that I am recommended to  upgrade within 1 week.

And so I did so and followed the upgrade instructions here to update from 13.0 to 13.1R after seeing a message that the 13.0 was one week before it's end of life date:









						FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE Installation Instructions
					

FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms.




					www.freebsd.org
				




Unfortunately, the update did not complete, so I looked at noVNC and realized something was wrong and irrecoverable soft update errors had happened.

At that point, I used the /rescue/sh shell to run fsck -yf which did clean the file system. I tried to attach this, but it says too large for server to process although it is only 22.6 MB. As a second option I also made this youtube link: 



_View: https://youtu.be/kW8zK3mH5NA_


Then I rebooted from the single user mode into multi user mode.

At this point in time I was able to SSH as root in like normal.

The normal next step for installation would be to run 

freebsd-update install 

again after rebooting.

I did this.

And then now the server is giving me the dreaded error 

ELF interpreter /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 not found, error 8

Abort trap

From the rescue shell I can tell that the file above does exist, but has size 0.

Unfortunately, I can't download new binary files to replace it without network connectivity.

Did I do something wrong or do you think there is a drive failure going on, with the soft update issue mentioned, and the empty ld-elf.so.1 file?

Or is there a bug possibly in the update between 13.0 and 13.1?

As of right now this issue I'm describing is affecting students and teachers and a lot of content I have online as free resources with 40,000+ hits per day.

It's not affecting any revenue because I don't make any from my sites, not even any type of ads or affiliate links or anything, but it's still kind of a big deal for me to have my server down.

Thank you so much!!

Joseph Myers


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## T-Daemon (Jul 20, 2022)

jkmyers4 said:


> At this point in time I was able to SSH as root in like normal.





jkmyers4 said:


> And then now the server is giving me the dreaded error
> 
> ELF interpreter /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 not found, error 8
> 
> ...


If you are able to ssh(1) into the system, and are able to execute /rescue/* commands, to get a network connection, if dynamically configured IP by DHCP, try `/rescue/dhclient <interface>`.

If static, try `/rescue/ifconfig <options> <interface>` .

On condition that /usr/bin/fetch is working, you can fetch a base.txz, unpack it in a temporary directory, and replace /libexec/ld-elf.so.1.

If /usr/bin/fetch is not working, you can use /rescue/nc (netcat) to receive that file from another 13.1 FreeBSD system, sending it with the mentioned netcat utility.


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