For you Slacksters out there maybe you can suggest a solution to my self-inflicted wound. I was in the process of upgrading a 14.2 system to 15.0 using the UPGRADE.txt instructions. I've done this numerous time before, successfully. Except this time, I think I must have not done the first 'upgradepkg .../a/glibc-solibs-*.txz'. When I got to 'upgradepkg .../a/tar-*.txz', it did that OK, but for all subsequent upgradepkg attempts I got an error that it was missing a lib.

I tried restoring just the tar binary from 14.2, but that didn't work.

Is there a way I could fix this screw-up without restoring the system from backup? Even attempting to install the 14.2 tar package wouldn't work because it required tar!

Boot from a 15.0 installation USB, mount the root partition and extract the aaa_glibc-solibs package over /mnt, maybe?

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A full installation of 14.2 includes bsdtar (from package libarchive). You can use it. A similar case was here:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...4/#post6334198

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Upgrading 14.2.. Switch to the easy way: install 15.0 from DVD or PXE if you have a lan.

I haven't done this in a long while but I recall botching a similar upgrade perhaps from 13.0 to 13.1 or something and I did this basically:

1) Boot the 15.0 media
2) Mount the 15.0 package tree somewhere like /cdrom
3) Mount your 14.2 root fs maybe on /mnt
4) use installpkg with switches --root /mnt to install (don't worry about upgrading them)the packages in steps 1, and 2 of UPGRADE.txt

Reboot into your 14.2 environment (it should work now)

5) go to run 1
6) you can removepkg the old 14.2 versions of the packages in steps 1 and 2; you might use -warn first to make sure there are no 'surprises'
It would probably be a good idea to then repeat steps 1 and 2 as well just to be sure everything is consistent.
7) Finish the upgrade

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These were all useful suggestions. I'll keep this thread in case I ever mess this up again. What I ended up doing was booting the 14.2 DVD, removing the OS related directories (i.e. not /root, not /home and such), and restoring the drive from backup with 'tar --keep-newer-files'. That didn't take too long -- maybe an hour; an appropriate "timeout" for being stupid (in fact it took a bit longer as the computer was remote and I had to travel there and back). I then followed the UPGRADE.TXT instructions paying close attention!