In February 2005 I put instructions online explaining how to perform a binary upgrade from FreeBSD 4.8 to FreeBSD 4.11. When it came time to upgrade my FreeBSD 5.3 system to instead run FreeBSD 5.4, I found that some slightly different steps were needed, so I decided to put together a 5.3-to-5.4 upgrade guide as well. What follows are the steps I used to upgrade my FreeBSD 5.3 system to FreeBSD 5.