Failed to configure bootloader

I'm working on installing FreeBSD 14.3 on a Dell Precision 7510 using a usb flashed with the .img file from the installer page. The installer works fine, and it can locate the disc, but when I attempt to format the disc as unencyrpted ZFS, it goes through the process until stopping with the error
Code:
Failed to configure bootloader
and the install process ends. The one other post I was able to find about a similar situation suggested that the EFI drive needs to be formatted as FAT before installing somehow, though I'm not sure why or how I would go about doing so.
 
There is no EFI "drive" but there can be an efi partition. You only need it if you can actually UEFI boot the machine. As this is an older system, I'm not sure if it's actually capable of UEFI booting. You might need to use the more traditional BIOS boot. I would recommend setting the boot to GPT+UEFI so you'll have both freebsd-boot (for the traditional BIOS boot) and efi partition (for UEFI boot).

The one other post I was able to find about a similar situation suggested that the EFI drive needs to be formatted as FAT before installing somehow,
You don't have to create the partitions beforehand, just make sure the disk is completely empty and the installer will create all the necessary partitions for you (assuming you only want to run FreeBSD and no other OS).
 
It looks like it's an old problem that arises when you choose to manually partition the disk. I don't know if this is a real problem (bug) or not.

Actually, if your disk is dedicated to FreeBSD, wipe it and start an installation with automatic partitionning.

In case you absolutely want to manually partition you disk, you need something like that, except the freebsd-boot partition that is dedicated to BIOS booting:
Code:
$ gpart show
=>      40  41942960  nda0  GPT  (20G)
        40    532480     1  efi  (260M)
    532520      1024     2  freebsd-boot  (512K)
    533544       984        - free -  (492K)
    534528   4194304     3  freebsd-swap  (2.0G)
   4728832  37214168     4  freebsd-zfs  (18G)
 
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