Botting FreeBSD from GRUB

olig ogaumond at oricom.ca
Tue Mar 23 08:28:27 PST 2004


I have Windows XP and Linux already installed on my Laptop and want to 
also install FreeBSD (by the way I'm new to FreeBSD but quite 
experimented with Linux).  I successfully installed FreeBSD on a primary 
partition (slice) with most of the default options.  However I did 
choose to leave the MBR untouched because I want to boot FreeBSD with 
GRUB.  I can boot Linux and Windows without problems from GRUB, but 
can't boot FreeBSD.

Here is my partition layout (from Linux's fdisk)
# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 30.0 GB, 30005821440 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3648 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1        2015    16185456    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            2373        3648    10249470    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda3            2016        2372     2867602+  a5  FreeBSD
/dev/hda5            2373        2435      506016   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda6            2436        2467      257008+  83  Linux
/dev/hda7            2468        3187     5783368+  83  Linux
/dev/hda8            3188        3353     1333363+  83  Linux
/dev/hda9            3354        3647     2361523+  83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order

And my Grub configuration concerning FreeBSD

# For booting FreeBSD
title  FreeBSD 5.2
root   (hd0,2,a)
kernel /boot/loader


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

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

But I can succesfully mount it under FreeBSD booting with the fixit floppy.

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

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.

Olivier




More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list