Cant boot FreeBSD from Linux.

[clemens]

Im not sure if this is a bug or a deficiency in GRUB, but I would
appreciate a response from someone who knows.

I have a Pentium III with 2disks, and several boot partitions.  There
are several versions of Linux, Win2000, FreeBSD, and previously Solaris
on the disks.

A couple of years ago, I BELIEVE I was using GRUB, but may have still 
been using LILO.  At that time I could boot my FreeBSD partition
(using /boot/loader on the FreeBSD partition) from GRUB/LILO.

I doubt that I would have moved from LILO to GRUB if it had not been
able to boot the FreeBSD partition, but

I have recently tried it, needing to test some code in FreeBSD
(and after updating the FreeBSD partitions to 4.9 and 5.1) and find
that GRUB will not boot the FreeBSD partitions, claiming that it doesn't
understand the partition type, viz:

    Booting 'FreeBSD 5.1'
    root (hd0,1,a)
       Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xa5
    kernel /boot/loader

    Error 17: Cannot mount selected partition

    Press any key to continue...

and the partition type 0xa5 clearly is FreeBSD.

So, finally the question.
Is it REALLY true that GRUB doesn't understand FreeBSD partition types,
and can't boot FreeBSD???

Or, more likely am I doing something wrong???

My understanding is that several of the *BSD partition types are all the same,
and looking at the code (grub) it LOOKS like it might understand some 
other *BSD partition type, so Im holding out hope that there is some
way to do this...

-- 
                                        Reg.Clemens
                                        address@hidden