[Freedombox-discuss] HELP! The dist-upgrade bricked my FreedomBox and new images don't boot.

[A. F. Cano]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 02:52:15PM -0700, Sunil Mohan Adapa wrote:
> On 9/16/25 13:10, A. F. Cano wrote:
> [...]
> 
> Sorry to hear the the firmware upgrade to UEFI is not an easy path. We are
> left with two options:
> 
> 1) Install FreedomBox Bookworm image[1]. And perform a distribution upgrade on
> it before restoring your backup. This path should work well.

This worked, up to the point of restoring the backup.  Found the
bookworm image here:

https://ftp.freedombox.org/pub/freedombox/hardware/amd64/bookworm/freedombox-bookworm_all-amd64.img.xz

and after decompressing it, put it on an SD card:

sudo dd bs=1M if=freedombox-bookworm_all-amd64.img of=/dev/sdf conv=fdatasync status=progress

and powered on the apu2.  Nothing was happening.  Luckily I let it do
its thing, periodically checking if I could access the web interface.
I couldn't ssh into it either.  Apparently it was upgrading for 36
hours.  I finally was able to access the web interface to set up
the admin user, but after many tries where I got a "403 Forbidden You
don't have permission to access /plinth/users/firstboot/ on this
server".

When I finally had access, the Freedombox had upgraded to 25.9.3.  I was
getting messages that system was going to reboot at 2AM UTC, so I let it
run.  The next day I found that it was in a boot loop.  I had to unplug
it and do a cold boot.  Then it worked.  This is a peculiarity of the
apu2.  It needs a complete power-off to reboot properly.  I let it run
so the unattended upgrades would run overnight and, sure enough, the
next day, it was up to 25.12.

Then I tried to do a restore from the remote backup.  Even though this
FreedomBox stil has the default 10.42.0.1 address and the computer I'm
using to talk to it has 10.42.0.3, the outside interface is connected to
my main network (192.168.200.x) and I can access the computer where the
backups are via ssh from it.

Added the remote backup location and the password to access it.  Got:

Added new remote SSH repository
SSH host already verified	(I had tried this before)

And then:

Error establishing connection to server: Command
'['borg','init','--encryption','none','/media/<long string of digits>']'
returned non-sero exit status 2.

Repository removed.

And here I'm stuck.  What do I need to do to restore my backups to this
new image?

Thanks.

> ...