setting currdev correctly after repartitioning

I've imaged with dd an rpi4 ssd and created on the hardware
4*8GB swap partitions, and have transferred with cpdup the
freebsd contents from the image back to the ssd. The msdos-based
EFI and rpi partition was unmodified.

When I try to boot, it drops an OK prompt with the following error

"Setting currdev to disk0p2:
ERROR: cannot open /boot/lua/loader.lua: no such file or directory."

The partition table looks like this

# gpart show da5 (this is da5 on another machine)

=>        63  1953525105  da5  MBR  (932G)
           63           1       - free -  (512B)
           64      524288    1  fat32lba  [active]  (256M)
       524352  1952448512    2  freebsd  (931G)
       1952972864      552304       - free -  (270M)


# gpart show da5s2

=>         0  1952448512  da5s2  BSD  (931G)
            0    16777216      1  freebsd-swap  (8.0G)
     16777216    16777216      2  freebsd-swap  (8.0G)
     33554432    16777216      4  freebsd-swap  (8.0G)
     50331648    16777216      5  freebsd-swap  (8.0G)
     67108864  1885339648      6  freebsd-ufs  (899G)

I wonder if freebsd-ufs needs to be the first slice? 
Is that what the error means? if not, how can I tell it
that the loader is on (when it's installed on the rpi4) /dev/da5s2f ?

it's not in fstab. context is -current and ufs2.

fstab looks like this

# Custom /etc/fstab for FreeBSD embedded images
/dev/ufs/rootfs         /               ufs     rw,noatime              1       1
/dev/msdosfs/EFI                /boot/efi       msdosfs rw,noatime      0       0
tmpfs                   /tmp            tmpfs   rw,mode=1777            0       0
#
#/dev/label/growfs_swap none            swap    sw                      0       0
#md                     none            swap    sw,late,file=/usr/swap0 0       0

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