Problem in booting OpenBSD after installation

diam0nd · 05-19-2004, 06:55 AM

Hi... before the installation of OpenBSD 3.5 I had Windows 2000 & Slackware Linux. then I installed OpenBSD on what linux calls /dev/hda7 , and when I added this:

Code:

other=/dev/hda7
  label=OpenBSD
  read-only

to /etc/lilo.conf, and tried to run "lilo", I got the following error:

Code:

# lilo
Added Windows *
Added Linux
Fatal: First sector of /dev/hda7 doesn't have a valid boot signature

I tried to flag /dev/hda7 as boot in cfdisk while in linux, and then to write down the partition table, and it says:

Code:

Wrote partition table, but re-read table failed.  Reboot to update table.

and now nothing... it doesn't work... what can I do ?
TIA.

edit: I would like to mention that cfdisk shows only one OpenBSD partition when I execute it, and when I mount /dev/hda7 on linux I get the root partition mounter, but at the installation I made 6 partitions with disklabel:
/ , /tmp, /var, /usr, home, and the swap partition.
Oh, and cfdisk shows the OpenBSD partition as a logical partition.

jailbait · 05-19-2004, 06:28 PM

"I installed OpenBSD on what linux calls /dev/hda7"

I am not certain but I don't think that BSD is bootable from a logical partition. I think that you have to give OpenBSD a primary partition, which BSD calls a slice. Then BSD creates partitions (called logical partitions in Linux) within its slice.

It has been over a year since I installed BSD so maybe sombody else has a better answer.

___________________________________
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Steve Stites

diam0nd · 05-21-2004, 07:21 AM

yeah, you are right.
I didn't had any primary partition, so I did some swap between that logical partition and a windows primary partition, And it works fine.

Something that I've found very annoying is, that the disklabel part at the installation didn't change the default starting sector for every new partition when I wanted to create a new one after the first one was created ( the / partition ), and I needed to calculate it manually with a calculator (which becoms very annoying with big numbers.)

but nevermind, now it works fine. thanks anyway