Upgrade FreeBSD using DVD

[FKEinternet]

I have a FreeBSD installation that had an upgrade failure between 8.? and 9.4 (IIRC). In the interest of getting 10.2 working properly on the machine, I downloaded the DVD image and burned a disc. Now I'm trying to figure out how to do the upgrade, and all I can find are instructions pointing to freebsd-update() which appears to only do an over-the-air upgrade, which would involve downloading FreeBSD again from the server. That's neither a reasonable use of my bandwidth nor the server's resources.

I booted onto the live CD, mounted the existing /usr partition, and copied the contents of the /usr/freebsd-dist to the hard disk so I'd have ready access to the source tree: I'm guessing I'm going to have to build the new installation from source.

Am I going down the right path? Is there an easier way to do this? Can I tell freebsd-update() to use the DVD instead of a remote server as the upgrade source? How would I do that?

 

[hedwards]

You've probably given up by now and done a reinstallation, that's what I'd recommend considering that you've had one failure and are trying to go between non-consecutive major releases.

Take a look at https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/updating-upgrading-freebsdupdate.html

It appears that if you copy the files to the /var/db/freebsd-update directory that you should be able to skip fetching them and just install them. But, I haven't done this myself and I'd recommend against it in this case.