I've run across this a few times, where I've improperly shut down a VM (tapped the wrong button for power off vs ACPI shutdown) and this lead to an unbootable image with the message before boot:
booting hd0a:/bsd: hd0a:/bsd: Inappropriate file type or format failed(79). will try /bsd boot> To recover, I usually boot into bsd.rd and fsck the filesystems, but in most cases the cause is a corrupted /bsd. Indeed, the last encounter with this, /bsd had a size of only a few dozen kilobytes. To fix, I rm /bsd && cp /bsd.booted /bsd - reboot, re-calculate the checksum and I'm on my way again. I'd like to understand why this is happening. Is this plain unlucky FFS corruption or did I trigger the power-off during the kernel reorder sequence and it had only partially written out the file to disk? Since I have encountered this more than once now, is there a way to increase the resiliency? The host is on UPS power, so the cause is almost always user error (accidental power off). Could disabling kernel relinking in the image improve the situation?
