Problems with FreeBSD

[Toomas Univer]

Hi,
I had some problems with GRUB, although I was able to fix them, I
decided to report about this.

I have 3 OS'es in my PC and GNU GRUB loader to boot them. The OS'es are
Windows XP Pro, FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE and Slackware Linux 9.0, this is
also the order in which they are installed, into single HDD. GRUB
version is 0.93. Here is my disk layout:

hda1 - NTFS5 - primary partition
hda2 - freebsd (ID 165) - primary partition
    swap (drive inside the freebsd partition)
    '/' - UFS2 + SoftUpdates (drive inside the freebsd partition)
hda3 - '/boot' - ReiserFS - primary partition
hda5 - swap - Linux Swap - logical partition
hda6 - '/' - ReiserFS - logical partition

Stage1 is installed into the MBR and Stage1.5 and Stage2 parts into
hda3. I had no problems with Linux, I used the GRUB documentation and
everything works fine. With Windows I used chainloading. There were no
problems but I noticed that 'makeactive' is not required. The problems
came with FreeBSD. I used the GRUB Docs and entered the following lines
into the menu.lst file:

title FreeBSD 5.1 RELEASE
root (hd0,2,b)
kernel /boot/loader

then I tried with 'root (hd0,2)' and in both ways I got the message that
the filesystem is reiserfs and /boot/loader is not found. My guess was
that prehaps this is somehow connected with the new UFS2 filesystem
which may not be supported or something. The solution to this problem
was chainloading. The '/boot/loader' file is succesfully booted with the
following lines:

title FreeBSD 5.1 RELEASE
rootnoverify (hd0,2)
chainloader +1

The only problem with this seems to be the slow boot time. There is an
approximately 20 seconds delay between the chainloader and the actual
boot. My guess is that this is because of the swap area before UFS2.
I hope this knowledge is somehow useful and helps to make my favorite
bootloader even better :)

Tom.