# Upgrading broken 11.2 to 12.1



## Paul Floyd (Jan 14, 2020)

I'm about to attempt to upgrade a dead 11.2 install (the upgrade 11.1 to 11.2 made it unbootable).

What are my best options for doing this? I've burned a 12.1 DVD, and backed up my home directory. I don't think that I backed up files like rc.conf. I'll probably try
1. make copies of rc.conf and loader.conf
2. reinstall from DVD


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## SirDice (Jan 14, 2020)

Paul Floyd said:


> I'm about to attempt to upgrade a dead 11.2 install (the upgrade 11.1 to 11.2 made it unbootable).


I would try to fix this first, do you have an idea _why_ it's not booting any more?


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## Paul Floyd (Jan 14, 2020)

SirDice said:


> I would try to fix this first, do you have an idea _why_ it's not booting any more?



I've tried many times (and posted a few threads here). The bootloader broke is about all that I can tell.


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## SirDice (Jan 14, 2020)

Is there anything important on there? Make sure you have backups of the data at least. You will also want to backup rc.conf and the entire /usr/local/etc/ directory. The loader.conf isn't that important but it won't hurt to back it up too. 

Then I would probably just do a clean install of the new version. Trying to upgrade an already broken system will likely just result in even more breakage.


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## Paul Floyd (Jan 18, 2020)

I just reinstalled from DVD. On rebooting I got a load of gptzfsboot errors (and some geometry errors that I didn't note). However I did get as far as booting.

After a few reboots to get KDE5 up and running it now hangs on boot.

ZFS: i/o error - all block copies unavailable
ZFS: can't read MOS of pool zroot
gptzfsboot: failed to mount default zpool zroot

FreeBSD/x86 boot
(register dump)

BTX halted

This is on a pair of disks that are perhaps 2 years old but which have seen very little service. They pass the manufacturers Windows test.

It looks to me like ZFS boot on a mirrored system is still totally screwed.


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## shkhln (Jan 18, 2020)

Paul Floyd said:


> This is on a pair of disks that are perhaps 2 years old but which have seen very little service.



So? Why should this matter?



Paul Floyd said:


> It looks to me like ZFS boot on a mirrored system is still totally screwed.



Mirrored? In what way? Afaik, the usual recommendation for hardware raid controllers is basically "throw it in a garbage bin".


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## Paul Floyd (Jan 18, 2020)

Conceivably there could be a problem with the disks rather than a problem with FreeBSD.

This isn't a hardware raid. It's ZFS with 2 disks mirrored.


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