BSD booting

[Master of Reality]

I just installed FreeBSD on my computer on my second hd without letting it touch the MBR. I am using GRUB and didnt make a bootdisk when i installed BSD. What do I need to put in the GRUB.conf so that it will boot FreeBSD?

Also... What parition type do i put when trying to mount my FreeBSD partition from red hat? or is it possible?

[Master of Reality]

hmmmm.... maybe i should take off FreeBSD and put windows in its place?

[Nobber]

quote:Originally posted by Master of Reality / Bob:
I just installed FreeBSD on my computer on my second hd without letting it touch the MBR. I am using GRUB and didnt make a bootdisk when i installed BSD. What do I need to put in the GRUB.conf so that it will boot FreeBSD?

Shame you're not using LILO, because then I might be able to help you. (You boot FreeBSD using LILO in exactly the same way as you'd boot Windows using LILO.)
 

quote:
Also... What parition type do i put when trying to mount my FreeBSD partition from red hat? or is it possible?

As far as I know, it isn't. FreeBSD does bizarre things with an extended partition. Slices and what-have-you. It's a mystery to me.

[Master of Reality]

okay.... how do i take off GRUB and put on LILO, then put my RedHat and FreeBSD bottable from LILO??

[Master of Reality]

if i just run 'lilo' will it overwrite GRUB?

[voidmain]

If you have Grub installed on /dev/hda and your lilo.conf is configured to also install on /dev/hda then yup, it'll overwrite Grub.

[ June 21, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[Master of Reality]

Warning: device 0x0342 exceeds 1024 cylinder limit
Fatal: geo_comp_addr: Cylinder number is too big (2550 > 1023)
 
is the error I get when i run 'lilo'
does that mean I cant use LILO because something is too big?

[ June 21, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

[ June 21, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

[voidmain]

It means you should have created a small "/boot" partition at the beginning of your drive like I have suggested many times on this site.  Lilo does not like to have the kernel more than 1024 cylinders from the beginning of the disk.  I normally create a 50MB /boot partition as the first partition of every machine I install on.  Grub does not have this limitation (and neither do newer versions of LILO).

[Master of Reality]

I have a 31 MB /boot partition on /dev/hda
my root '/' partition is on /dev/hdb1

[Master of Reality]

this is my lilo.conf:

Code: [Select]

thats the wrong kernel isnt it?

[ June 21, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

[Master of Reality]

.... I realize the problem.... My FreeBSD doesnt have its kernel in the boot partition. How can I get my FreeBSD kernel to the boot partition?

[voidmain]

Actually you shouldn't need the BSD kernel in /boot, as long as you installed the BSD boot loader on /dev/hdb2 your lilo.conf should be correct.  I can't tell you whether the kernel you have in your lilo file is correct, it has to match your kernel and initrd filenames in /boot (same names should be in the grub configuration file). Did you recompile?  *.*.*debug certainly would not be a default distro kernel.

Try changing /dev/hdb2 to /dev/hdb for the location of your BSD install in your lilo.conf and see if that will boot it (basically make LILO kick off the BSD equivelant loader). Maybe BSD installed it's loader there.

And this page might be of some help to you:
http://students.seattleu.edu/hodeleri/FreeBSD/boot.html

And you can also mount your BSD partition in Linux if you want to look around at the configs:

# mkdir /mnt/bsd
# mount /dev/hdb2 /mnt/bsd -t ufs -o ufstype=44bsd

should do it.

[ June 22, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[Master of Reality]

my BSD partition is on /dev/hdb3 which is about 21 GB into the drive. I didnt install the bootloader. I will read those pages

[ June 22, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

[voidmain]

I'm not sure if the BSD loader has the 1024 cylinder issue but I would be willing to bet that it does not.  You should be able to install BSD on /dev/hdb3 but tell it to install the boot loader on /dev/hdb (or the BSD equivelant /dev/hdb).  Like I said, you should be able to mount the /dev/hdb3 partition and look at the boot loader configuration file and determine where you actually installed the boot loader.

[Master of Reality]

it wont let me mount it:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb3,
       or too many mounted file systems
       (could this be the IDE device where you in fact use
       ide-scsi so that sr0 or sda or so is needed?)

I went to that link, then clicked the link to 'home' and each time Mozilla 1.1a would crash. it didnt crash with konqueror.

[ June 22, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]