I guess it is something with the filesystem. Boot into the single mode runfsck -t ufs -y(if it is ufs).
fetch http://update.FreeBSD.org/10.1-RELEASE/amd64/pub.ssl sha256 pub.ssl rm -f pub.sslIt's the segmentation fault that is showing that is rather unusual. Basically let's see what happens if we manually run the commands done in the fetch_key() function of /usr/sbin/freebsd-update.
fetch http://update.FreeBSD.org/10.1-RELEASE/amd64/pub.ssl
sha256 pub.ssl
rm -f pub.ssl
Adjust your release and architecture as needed.
What do you get when you run this manually?
Is there a related error message in /var/log/messages ?
uname -a; freebsd-version.There seems to be something very wrong going on. Is VMWare set up correctly? Can you post information about the VM's configuration?
Also what version of FreeBSD is this? Post auname -a; freebsd-version.
Based on the name, it looks like a test machine. Can you see if you can replicate this in a supported FreeBSD release (9.1 was supported between 30 December 2012 - 31 December 2014)? See https://www.FreeBSD.org/security/unsupported.html. If this is a FreeBSD issue it may already be resolved.