Boot Problem

Koushik Narayanan koushikn at fastmail.fm
Thu May 5 18:59:58 PDT 2005


Hello,
I have a PC with Windows XP,FreeBSD-5.3 and Linux(Fedora).I use GRUB as
my boot manager and I boot into FreeBSD using chainloader.
I have XP and FreeBSD on primary partitions.I had a linux primary
partion apart from these.I wanted to convert that to UFS2 as my /usr
partition (FreeBSD) was almost full.I did that using bsdlabel and  mkfs.
After that the fdisk print output in linux showed the recently formated
partition as type Linux.So I installed linux-fdisk using the ports
collection and try to change the system-id of that partition,but it did
not work.I then booted into linux and did the same using fdisk.This time
it worked.But after that FreeBSD does not boot.(I don't see the rotating
/ and the loader.The system freezes and even numlock does not work )Here
is the fdisk print output from linux:

Disk /dev/hda: 20.0 GB, 20060135424 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2438 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1         523     4200966    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2             524         905     3068415   a5  FreeBSD
/*FreeBSD root partition*/
/dev/hda3   *         906        1152     1984027+  a5  FreeBSD
/*Partition I formated using bsdlabel and mkfs contains ports */
/dev/hda4            1153        2439    10336536    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            1153        1774     4996183+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6            2406        2438      265041   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7            1775        2146     2988058+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda8            2147        2405     2080386    b  W95 FAT32

Partition table entries are not in disk order

When I use GRUB autocomplete feature to check the contents of the
FreeBSD partions,It says Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition.(I
have done this before when FreeBSD was working fine and I could see the
contents of the partion).

Perhaps the /boot partion needs to be fsck'ed? And if that is so how can
I do it.(I found in the mail archives that fsck'ing UFS2 partitions
using linux is not possible.)

Thanks,

Koushik Narayanan


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