# EFI boot block stuck at loader.conf



## Rastko (Feb 13, 2018)

I tried to add another partition with bsdinstall, but I've bricked my current installation, which was installed as ZFS root using the whole disk.

I had to resize the zroot partition, and now it gets stuck after printing

`loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf
\`

Any help appreciated


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## SirDice (Feb 14, 2018)

You can't resize an existing partition that's in use on a zpool. You can enlarge it but you cannot make it smaller.


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## Rastko (Feb 14, 2018)

SirDice said:


> You can't resize an existing partition that's in use on a zpool. You can enlarge it but you cannot make it smaller.


What does "in use" mean? I resized it using a Live USB stick, and gpart. Digging a lot deeper, found out it's an encyption problem... as much as I figured out, the geli key doesn't correspond to the device file system size.

I'm guessing the geli restore file in this case is in the boot directory, even though it's usually in /var, but /var is not a separate file system in this case. So, I've tried `geli resize, geli restore, geli attach, kern.geom.debugflags`, etc., no luck. I believe I could get the `geli resize` thing to work if I knew the exact original size in bytes?

Although I already did a couple of back and forth resize operations. No move though. Could that geli metadata still be there?

It would be most helpful to know if AutoZFS partitioning behaves in a predictable manner, so I could pick up the size of my partition which is what the AutoZFS partitioner would do for, in my case, 458 GB free space, counting from the end of the disk.


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## SirDice (Feb 14, 2018)

Rastko said:


> What does "in use" mean? I resized it using a Live USB stick, and gpart.


It's linked to a zpool, so it's "in use" by the pool. It doesn't need to be "active". ZFS stores all sorts of information all over the disk (or in this case, the partition). So by making the partition smaller you just removed a bunch of data from the end of the partition.


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## Rastko (Feb 14, 2018)

Aha. So, ZFS being versatile as such, doesn't play well with partitioning utilities _post facto_?

As you might have gathered from some of my other posts, I would like to be able to boot a CURRENT and STABLE on the same machine. Is it possible to do it from a dedicated ZFS disk, or do I need to partition it first?


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