Mounting a RHLinux 7.1 partition

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Isaac Grover <isaac.grover at gmail.com> writes:

> Once I had FreeBSD 5.4 set up, I put the RHLinux drive in the FreeBSD
> machine as primary slave.  Manually mounting the drive didn't seem to
> work since I could find which /dev/ entry the RHLinux drive ended up
> on, and of course fdisk wouldn't help for the same reason.  So I
> pulled the RHLinux drive from the FreeBSD machine, set it up as
> primary master on another machine, and was going to do the necessary
> file copies over the network.  However, now it boots up with the
> FreeBSD menu, giving me one option (F1) to boot FreeBSD, and pressing
> F1 yields a beep from the PC speaker, and no boot.

Sorry, but FreeBSD doesn't just install MBRs willy-nilly.  After you
put the Linux drive in the FreeBSD box you must have manually run some
program that installed a new MBR on the Linux drive, and there's only
a few likely possibilites (which you should remember using):
sysinstall (the OS installer/upgrader), fdisk, boot0cfg,
bsdlabel/disklabel.

> What happened to my RHLinux MBR and how can I either: 1) restore the
> MBR or 2) retrieve my data?

I'm suspecting it's all still on the Linux disk in your FreeBSD box
and you moved the wrong disk, which won't boot in its new box.

If you need to replace the Linux disk's MBR, a Linux rescue floppy or
CDROM which can run LILO or GRUB should handle it.  Or you could make
a Grub floppy on another system and booting from that, use it's
command line to poke around and learn where the Linux stuff is located
so you'll know what to tell the boot loader (MBR, lilo, Grub, etc) to
boot to.

If you can't get the booting fixed, put the disk in a Linux system and
try mounting its partitions there and run LILO or GRUB after reading
how to configure them.