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James Cornell wrote:
> William D Waddington wrote:
>> James Cornell wrote:
>>
>>> It's obvious that the order of the systems and the bootable flag
>>> impacts the order. So it's best to have Solaris installed into the
>>> mbr and other loaders stuck in their own partition superblock, being
>>> chainloaded. This is how I've been doing it for years.
>>
>> IIRC, the Solaris installation puts a "vanilla" boot loader in the
>> drive's MBR. That boot loader just boots the first active partition,
>> which is the Solaris partition. Which these days has grub in its
>> boot sector.
>>
>> I swapped a few emails with one of Sun's boot architects a while ago
>> discussing this. I was a little peeved about the Sun installation
>> always stepping on the MBR. His point was that by installing a
>> vanilla MBR and setting Solaris active, they were sure that _something_
>> would boot following the installation, and that the boot loader
>> invoked understood how to boot Solaris.
>>
>> I have finessed this during a few installations to preserve my original
>> MBR (to keep a "magic" ThinkPad MBR, or existing grub or System
>> Commander MBR) by creating the Solaris partition _and setting it active_
>> before running the Solaris installer.
>>
>> Don't know if that still works...
>>
>> This requires chainloading the Solaris boot loader (grub or the previous
>> one) from whatever is managing booting.
>>
>> Just adding a little noise.
>>
>> Bill
> Oh, I understand your setup now, you need it the other way around. One
> can say the same thing about Windows stomping hard on boot loaders,
> hehe. :-)
Indeed.
> So you mean fdisk, then label and set active, then run the installer?
> (Probably not Caiman obviously, since afaik it rewrites the table)
Yep. Even with the partition built and set active in advance, the
Solaris installer will _still_ diddle the partition tables, just not
the boot code. In my somewhat limited experience...
This table diddling gives System Commander fits, so I always had to
go back and hand edit the CHS values. grub (either box-stock or
the Solaris version) is much more forgiving about real or imagined
disk geometry.
Some rather gassy notes re *nix on my laptops here: www.beezmo.com
But, in the interest of full disclosure: on my T61 I have gone over
to the dark side. I just run a full XP install on the bare metal
and many unixen under VMWare server.
It simplifies several things. I can use the Lenovo backup tool to
capture a restore image of the whole thing, unixen included, for
instance.
I do my code on the laptop in whatever OS is appropriate,
and in the cases where I need Linux or Solaris on the bare metal to test
PCI device drivers I multi-boot on a deskside with either grub or SC.
Or fire up a creaky old Ultra 10 :)
Bill
--
--------------------------------------------
William D Waddington
Bainbridge Island, WA, USA
william.waddington@xxxxxxxxxx
--------------------------------------------
"Even bugs...are unexpected signposts on
the long road of creativity..." - Ken Burtch
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