Installing pot on FreeBSD: no such pool 'zroot'

Question

According to the documentation of pot, the following has to be done to install it:

pkg install -y pot
pot init -v

I tried this, but ended up with the following error:

cannot create 'zroot/pot': no such pool 'zroot'
cannot create 'zroot/pot/bases': no such pool 'zroot'

I have not been able to find how to solve this issue online. Has anyone encounterd this and does anyone know how to fix it?

System info:

```                        `       
  ` `.....---.......--.```   -/    -------------
  +o   .--`         /y:`      +.   OS: FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p4 amd64
   yo`:.            :o      `+-    Uptime: 20 hours, 30 mins
    y/               -/`   -o/     Packages: 88 (pkg)
   .-                  ::/sy+:.    Shell: sh
   /                     `--  /    Terminal: /dev/pts/0
  `:                          :`   CPU: AMD EPYC-Rome (1) @ 1.996GHz
  `:                          :`   GPU: 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI vgapci0@pci0:0:2:0: class=0x030000
   /                          /    Memory: 420MiB / 987MiB
   .-                        -.
    --                      -.
     `:`                  `:`
       .--             `--.
          .---.....----.

This is an instance running on Vultr.

Thank you

Answer 1

Turns out Vultr configures Freebsd with ufs instead of zfs. After changing to zfs, the software worked.

See5 https://people.freebsd.org/~lidl/blog/re-root.html](https://people.freebsd.org/~lidl/blog/re-root.html) for changng the filesystem.

Answer 2

First see if there are any pools listed using this command (looking for zroot):

zpool list

If no (which is probably the reason), create a pool using:

zpool create zroot /dev/sda1

ATTENTION: replace sda1 with the actual volume you want to install the pool to. you can list the disks using sudo fdisk -l or lsblk

Then you can run the init command again:

pot init -v