Advice required on non MS OS

The power of the dark side is indeed currently centered on Celbridge! I got a really nice installation screen for Solaris 10 but then I hit the old 'install to which disk' screen and I cried off.

So, I have two hard disks. The master disk has a primary partition holding Win2K, The second disk has just data files. It does have a primary partition but it does not contain an OS. Both disks are NTFS formatted.

I have PartitionMagic so I could probably hack away and create/delete/format partitions without losing any data or even (hopefully) having to copy it over to CD's prior to recopying back onto freshly formatted hard disks.

One issue I noted that I may have to contend with is that PartitionMagic comes with a boot manager. But that's not available to me because it won't work on NTFS partitions. Doh!

So, what's the best strategy for a Solaris 10 install with the least amount of pain?

1. I don't want to install windows again
2. I don't want to lose any data
3. I preferably dont' want to have to reformat either hard disk
4. I'd like to use a boot manager rather than keep 'hiding' primary partitions when I boot up.

C'mon all you geniuses out there - there must be a way

Cheers

Dave McD

My advice would be to defrag the bejeesus out of the second hard drive, use partition magic (or similar) to shrink the NTFS partition there, hence making room for the partitions you will need for Solaris.

When Making partitions for Linux/Unix I generally advise you make three:
1) / - pronounced 'slash' will contain the main Linux/Unix OS. 10GB is generally plenty for this. ideally you would like this formatted with some form of journaled file system like EXT3 of HFS but I have no idea which of those Solaris supports. (Al, could you suggest the best File System and size for / for Solaris)

2) swap - Swap space for your non-Windows OS. Appart from Windows most opperating systems avoid using a normal partition for swap files because doing so results in nasty defragmentation and other problems. Hence I even use a separate partition for swap on Windows systems (at least I used to before I completely stopped using Windows!). It is generally advised that this partitiin be twice the size of your RAM. It will need to be formated as a swap partition by your installer.

3) /home - for user home directories. Linux/Unix store all your settings in your home folder so if you have /home on a separate partition it means you can re-install your OS a million times on / and you won't loose your settings or preferences. In fact you can even change to a different flavour of Unix/Linux and still retain your settings for all the apps that are common to the two flavours (and that is a surpisingly very large amount!). Again I would advise a journaling file system like EXT3 or HFS+ for this partition.

If that all went over your head please get back to me and ask me to clarify the bits that were pitched to the wrong level. I'm kinda guessing as to what level I should pitch this to!

Best of luck,

Bart.

The power of the dark side is indeed currently centered on Celbridge! I got a really nice installation screen for Solaris 10 but then I hit the old 'install to which disk' screen and I cried off.

So, I have two hard disks. The master disk has a primary partition holding Win2K, The second disk has just data files. It does have a primary partition but it does not contain an OS. Both disks are NTFS formatted.

I have PartitionMagic so I could probably hack away and create/delete/format partitions without losing any data or even (hopefully) having to copy it over to CD's prior to recopying back onto freshly formatted hard disks.

One issue I noted that I may have to contend with is that PartitionMagic comes with a boot manager. But that's not available to me because it won't work on NTFS partitions. Doh!

So, what's the best strategy for a Solaris 10 install with the least amount of pain?

1. I don't want to install windows again
2. I don't want to lose any data
3. I preferably dont' want to have to reformat either hard disk
4. I'd like to use a boot manager rather than keep 'hiding' primary partitions when I boot up.

C'mon all you geniuses out there - there must be a way

Cheers

Dave McD

You will need to use partition magic or similar to shrink one of your disks to put Solaris on. I have a 5Gb solaris partition. I would shrink the windows OS partition if thats possible.

Once that done you should be able to start the install from the CD's, and hopefully It should be obvious where to install to. I've never tried with 2 hard disks though.

As for loosing data - when installing any other OS make backups! Though you could back up the windows disk and plug out your data disk just to be sure.

The solaris bootloader will take over when its installed. It will boot windows for you also. I;ve no idea what you mean about hiding partitions.

multiboot.solaris-x86.org is a great reference on this, but gets _way_ too technical for whats needed! I'll see if I can find better docs tomorrow.

Once you have things up and running you might want to make part of your data disk into a fat16 filesystem. Solaris cant read NTFS (neither can linux with any confidence) but dealing with fat16 is no problem. That will let you transfer files between the OS's.

My advice would be to defrag the bejeesus out of the second hard drive, use partition magic (or similar) to shrink the NTFS partition there, hence making room for the partitions you will need for Solaris.

When Making partitions for Linux/Unix I generally advise you make three:

Solaris x86 wourks a little differntly to linux here. You give it a chunk of the disk and it will make its own partition in there. So you dont need to worry about it in partition magic. And thankfully you dont need to worry about what you can put in an extended partition etc.

My Solaris box looks like:
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c1d0s0 6.7G 2.8G 3.8G 43% /
swap 1.8G 3.3M 1.8G 1% /tmp
/dev/dsk/c1d0p2:3 1.9G 835M 1.1G 44% /win
/dev/dsk/c1d0s7 7.9G 8.6M 7.8G 1% /usr/local

I use /usr/local/home rather than /home, but thats for convienience at work. /win there is a fat16 partition for sharing files with windows.

> Again I would advise a journaling file system like EXT3 or HFS+ for this partition.
With Solaris you'll be using the default UFS logging. This should be used on all partitions. It will probably be selected automatically and you may not even be asked about it. It just works (which is more than I can say for EXT3... I'm still bitter about having to re-rip all my mp3's thanks to it...)

The reason I was suggesting to use the 1st drive was that I'm not sure how windows will react to the Soalris boot loader loading it from a different disk, or for that matter how the solaris bootloader will know to use the second disk. Need to read up on that. My linux machine uses the GRUB bootloader which needs a very ugly hack to trick windows into booting on a second disk, perhaps that not an issue with solaris - I've never tried.

I've used GRub on two disk machines and it had no trouble at all booting Windows on the main hard disk and linux on the secondary disk. In fact I've also done it the other way round. A descent installer will put grub on the mbr of the primary and then it can boot anything from anywhere! (except Win98 & Win ME which insist on being on the primary).

I've used GRub on two disk machines and it had no trouble at all booting Windows on the main hard disk and linux on the secondary disk. In fact I've also done it the other way round. A descent installer will put grub on the mbr of the primary and then it can boot anything from anywhere! (except Win98 & Win ME which insist on being on the primary).

Windows 2000 also insists on being on the primary for me. You can however mess with Grub to boot windows and convince windows that it really is on the primary, and hence get 98 and 2000 to boot. I'll check by grub configs for the details.

Cheers,
~Al