Andy's Unix FAQ

Question;

Subject: dual boot
hi there,

i'm having problems on installing x86 solaris 8 on my pc. i have windows 98 on my first partition. when i try to boot on my solaris cd how do i specify the specific partition to install solaris (e.g to my second partition)?

i really appreciate any help.

thanks

Answer;

I may sound a little negative here, really just trying to protect you and your PC.....

The simple answer to your question;
If the solaris x86 installer does not find a Solaris partition on your hard disk it will run fdisk and allow you to create a one.

The installer will proceed to install Solaris on the first Solaris partition available to it.

As with any fdisk program you are advised to use extreme caution, as it's very easy to destroy all the data on your disk.

N.B. Some people use the Linux fdisk program to create a Solaris partition prior to installing Solaris x86.

Tips and Advice
The Solaris x86 install procedure has come a long way, and is much improved over earlier releases. That said it is still incredibly easy to erase your entire disk, and very few newcomers to x86 have escaped this fate.

You are thus STRONGLY advised to backup your disk and have all installation media to hand in the event that your other partitions are damaged;

The following points have been gleaned from personal experience.

1. As a newcomer, I would recommend that you ensure you have a large unallocated area of disk before starting the Solaris x86 install process. Solaris Fdisk is the least intuitive x86 partition manager I have ever come across, and thus it pays to minimise your interaction with it.
2. For disk space you ought to allow (1GB + 2*Ram_size) free prior to the installation. If all goes well you'll find that you end up with a lot of free space, and you'll likely curse me for it. However Sun are extremely conservative with their package sizes and you will have trouble doing a normal install in less than that.
3. Solaris wants 1 primary partition for the operating system and another for the boot area. Thus before exiting fdisk make sure you have no more than 3 primary partitions defined. Your partition table may well get corrupted beyond repair if you fail to observe this rule.
4. When the installer asks you to specify the swap slice size, DO NOT specify the minimal. Instead add a few megabytes ( 10MB is generally enough).
   There's a bug in the slice/format setup which causes the format to fail if you specify the minimum - "Format Failed" is the highly informative error message.
   Swap areas are explained in Virtual Memory, more about adding Swap
5. If the install process crashes, it usually does so without giving particularly useful diagnostics - "Format failed" is a common problem. There are a number of logfiles in the /tmp directory ( a ramdisk ) which you should look at before rebooting.

Hope I haven't put you off.

Good luck.