Booting problem

["Rakhesh Sasidharan" <rakhesh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I think this is a disk geometry issue, but am unclear on what I can do
about it and so thought I'd ask here. 

Here's my setup: I have three disks. IDE. On a x86 machine. Two of them
are primary master and slave. The third one is a secondary slave. They
have many OSes installed on them, and I use GRUB to boot between these.
I decided to install DragonFlyBSD on my third disk (the secondary slave)
-- as the fourth slice of that disk (ad3s4). Everything went fine (nice
installation process; kinda neat! :)) and when the installer asked where
it should install the bootblocks etc, I told it to go ahead and install
on ad3 (and use packet mode too, just in case). 

Then I rebooted, and told GRUB to chainload this partition. But I get
the following error: 
2:ad(2,a)<somesymbol><another symbol>:

I tried pressing ENTER and stuff like that, but nothing's happen (it
just makes a beep noise, that's all). And I tried typing stuff like
"boot0" and "help" or "kernel" etc, and it just says that that thing is
not to be found. 

I made the DragonFly slice using Linux. The disk is about 20gb, and this
slice is roughly 12gb. I took care to ensure that the start of the slice
is within the first 8gb (1024 cylinders). Infact, the slice starts at
cylinder 900 or something iirc. 

I even tried booting with the CD, then mounting the DragonFly
partitions, and installing the bootblocks again. Did something like
"boot0cfg ad3" couple of times ... giving the packet option now and
then, as well as mentioning "-s4" (because I notice it is saying slice 1
when I do "boot0cfg -v ad3" to see the current settings (is that how
things should be? slice 1? I thought it should say slice 4 coz that's
what contains DragonFly)). 

There's one option I haven't explored. The BIOS seems to be showing the
disk geometry as xxxxxx/16/63 as opposed to 2048/256/63 (which is what
Linux shows). Could that be what's causing the problem? 

I also wonder why it shows "2:ad(2,a)" in the error message? As in, 3 or
4 or some other number (coz its the 3rd disk or 4th slice ... unless the
loader is counting from 0 onwards) ...

Thanks,
Rakhesh