After several attempts and paying extreme attention to what was happening I have come up with the following directions to upgrade from FreeBSD 9.0 to FreeBSD 9.1 on a Rackspace Cloud Server.

Note: If these directions are not followed exactly than you may end up with a still running FreeBSD 9.0 kernel, see “uname -a” to check, or a non-booting system due to the ZFS error, “The kernel fails to mount a ZFS root filesystem with error 2.”

1. Login as root
2. cd /root
3. cp /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/XENHVM /root/XENHVM
4. ftp ftp.freebsd.org://pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/9.0-RELEASE/src.txz
5. tar -C / -xvzf src.txz
6. /usr/sbin/freebsd-update -r 9.1-RELEASE upgrade
7. /usr/sbin/freebsd-update install
8. cp /root/XENHVM /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/XENHVM
9. cd /usr/src
10. make buildkernel KERNCONF=XENHVM
11. make installkernel KERNCONF=XENHVM
12. shutdown -r now
13. Login as root
14. cd /root
15. /usr/sbin/freebsd-update install
16. cp /root/XENHVM /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/XENHVM
17. cd /usr/src
18. make buildkernel KERNCONF=XENHVM
19. make installkernel KERNCONF=XENHVM
20. shutdown -r now
21. Hard Reboot

To download a copy of the instructions click on:  Rackspace FreeBSD Upgrade

Need direct help?  Contact us at Sequential Logic.