Update:
After installing the week 38 updates on my laptop I ran into a different issue. First I was unable to boot my laptop because it failed to identify the home partition. I just rebooted it from the terminal and the next time it started mostly fine. Except when I ran the sudo eopkg check | grep Broken ... command to check for any broken files. It reorganized the order of some things ("system.base" files), but then output that clr-boot-manager was unable to mount /boot as it did not exist.
From there I rebooted my laptop to see what would happen. Surprisingly it booted with no issues and after running the command to repair broken files again no errors with clr-boot-manager were returned.
With this set of odd occurrences I decided to attempt to boot my desktop "just to see". The first attempt returned the same error start_image() returned device error. So then I tried with the other kernel (6.8 rather than 6.9) and my system booted with no issues. Now remember that last time I tried this the exact same error occured on both kernels, I have made absolutely no changes to anything, I only left my computer alone for a day and a bit.
After this fortuitous turn of events I immediately ran an update on the desktop. Following the update I ran the sudo eopkg check | grep Broken ... command to ensure that any broken files were repaired. It did the same thing as on my laptop and rearranged all the "system.base" files. I was incredibly confused by this.
I then rebooted my desktop and tried launching both kernels, both kernels now appear to work as normal.
I did one final check by running just sudo eopkg check and this returned an even odder result. All of the "system.base" packages which had been rearranged were now listed as broken. So then I ran the sudo eopkg check | grep Broken ... command one more time to repair these broken packages. It didn't find that any of the packages were broken, but once again rearranged the "system.base" files.
I do not know what caused any of the behaviour I have seen from my two systems. I also have no clue if my systems are now stable or if they could fall back into recovery mode at any moment. This is extremely concerning to me as it seems that all of this instability was linked to the week 38 updates. I would not like to mark this as a solution as nothing has been done and I believe that the issue persists.
I do not know if you are the right person to contact about this @ReillyBrogan but I would really appreciate a staff member seeing this as I saw other people having similar issues in the update thread. I have absolutely no clue what to do from here, or if I should even try to do anything.
