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Date:      Tue, 23 Mar 2004 10:07:48 -0800
From:      underway@comcast.net (Gary W. Swearingen)
To:        olig <ogaumond@oricom.ca>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Botting FreeBSD from GRUB
Message-ID:  <rjekrj5te3.krj@mail.comcast.net>
In-Reply-To: <406065BA.7060809@oricom.ca> (olig's message of "Tue, 23 Mar 2004 11:28:42 -0500")
References:  <406065BA.7060809@oricom.ca>

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olig <ogaumond@oricom.ca> writes:

> And my Grub configuration concerning FreeBSD
>
> # For booting FreeBSD
> title  FreeBSD 5.2
> root   (hd0,2,a)
> kernel /boot/loader

Looks good (and matching your fdisk output) and similar to mine which
works OK with 5.2+.  I can confirm that "kernel <kernel>" doesn't
work, and the loader does.

> When I try to boot FreeBSD I get the following error from grub:
> filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xa5
> error 17 cannot mount selected partition

Never seen that.  The partition type is same as mine.

> Also I can't mount the FreeBSD partition under Linux.
> # mount -t ufs /dev/hda3 /mnt/freebsd/
> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda3,
>         or too many mounted file systems

I'm not at all sure, but I think that your "hda3" is telling "mount"
that there is a file system where there are actually boot records,
etc.  IIRC, the BSD partitions have Linux numbers > 4.  Check your
dmesg or boot messages to see what it detected.  Could be you need
UFS support compiled into your Linux kernel.  When I tried a couple
of years ago, Linux couldn't even read my FreeBSD files reliably.

> Is there a way to install FreeBSD's bootloader on a floppy to boot my
> installed system?

I doubt it.  But you can install GRUB or LILO of a floppy to do it.
Except I suppose GRUB would behave the same for you there too.

> I am quite mixed up with FreeBSD slices and sub-partitions which are
> not the same as DOS or Linux partitions.  Also after installing
> FreeBSD, Linux's fdisk reported problems about partitions not ending
> on cylinder boudaries.

I used Linux for many years and learned to ignore those common msgs.


I have no solution for you, but you might try playing with the GRUB
commands at it's prompt during boot.  You should be able to poke
around the FreeBSD file system a bit, for example.

You might also try installing FreeBSD's "sysutils/grub" port and
see if that works any better.  I remember some change in behavior
after switched to 5.x, which I think was a coincidental GRUB change.
Unfortunatly, I can't quite remember what it was -- IIRC, it now won't
let me install the grub boot loader from a running FreeBSD like it
once did and I had to do it from GRUB's boot prompt or from a grub
floppy or something.  Maybe the grub program seemed to be generally
broken when run from my FreeBSD shell, not being able to recognize
all the disk partitions or something.



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