hi everyone,
I'm totally new to Solaris. As an enthusiast, I wants to install Solaris 10 on my Win XP PC's 2nd Hard Drive(40GB, empty) from Solaris 10 DVD.
I need help from how to format 2nd Hard Drive to how can I configure the PC so it asks me which OS to load every time.
I will highly appreciate everyone's help as I've just joined SDN. Many Thanx in advance, Jags
Hello.
The BIOS of a computer normally does not allow booting an OS from the second hard disk. Many OSs do not allow booting from the second hard disk, too.
Some OSs (like Linux) can be booted from the second hard disk if you manage to load its boot sector using a boot manager (you can use the boot manager of Windows XP) . However this is rather tricky. I do not know whether Solaris allows this.
Booting from the second hard disk is a very very very tricky thing in any case.
Martin
Many Many Many Thanx for your reply Martin. Ok Now I know booting Solaris 10 from second hard disk is not a good idea.
Can you PLEASE tell me what I should be doing then? Like how to do partition on my primary hard disk for Solaris 10 & after that what to do so it asks me which OS to load every time I start PC.
Thanx again as I wanna install Solaris 10 with Win XP. Jags_FL
Hi!
I installed Solaris 10 on my second hard drive and no problems at all.
Win XP is on the first drive. My Award BIOS will boot from any of
my hard drives, as well as USB drives.
Because I'm paranoid, I removed my Windows drive from my system.
Installed Solaris (and Grub) on the second drive. Reconnecting my XP
drive, all is well.
I will add XP to the Solaris Grub menu (after I reinstall--my first Solaris
install and the partition sizes need to be changed because I chose poorly).
Currently I just hit F12 at startup to choose my boot device.
Happened upon this post while searching for an answer to something else and figured I would give my 2 cents on what you are trying to do so as to offer you some other ideas, as in stuff I have done personally in similar situations, just in case the other suggestions don't work out (and to avoid repartitioning your main hdd if it is your ONLY computer with an OS you have available).
Assuming you have a standard tower or mid-tower with at least 1 free 5 1/4" bay open, and if your motherboard doesn't support booting from a slave drive, and if you prefer a hardware solution so your OS installs are isolated from each other to be certain no corruption happens, like I personally do*. Then you may consider a pair of key lock internal hard drive racks (newegg search "hard drive rack ide" or sata). You would need at least 1 free 5 1/4" bay for the rack mount, then place the hard drives in their housings, each set as master, and you can stick in which ever OS drive you want, turn the key, then boot up (I recommend storing drives not in use in some large anti-static bags for protection). If you have 2 open slots, like I did on my tower, then you can connect both to the same cable and leave both in at all times. Just make sure ONLY 1 drive is keyed "on" at a time, or else you will get errors due to duplicate masters set. Also make sure you ONLY turn the keys when the system is OFF, the racks do NOT make the drives hot-swappable, it is only to offer an easier solution for using multiple hard drives on one PC so you don't have to open the case all the time and potentially damage the pins or the drives when switching them out.. Also you may need longer cables depending on the motherboard controller placement and the size of your tower, 80 wire 40pin if you are dealing with IDE (when you get longer I've noticed less 80 wire and more slower 40 wire cables). As always when dealing with the actual hardware, be extra careful, make sure power is off and PC is unplugged, touch the PC power supply if you don't have better solutions such as anti-static mat/wrist band, etc. You probably know all of this, but just making sure.
*I lost a lot of data one of the first times I tried an open source OS many years ago (some Linux distro, I forget which), I tried to repartition my windows 98 drive, it worked fine for about a week booting between the two, then most my personal windows files suddenly were random sizes and random folders ended up full of garbage files with garbage file names among other peculiar things.. If I partition a drive I generally only do it BEFORE I put data on it or install OS's.. or at least make CERTAIN that I have adequate methods for restoring my OS and personal files (such as imaging my OS install to a larger drive temporarily, etc)..
Anyway, was just offering some possible alternatives to repartitioning your main OS drive.. -TCP
hi " TCP "
Many thanx for ur help to install Solaris 10 on 2nd Hard Drive. By the time I got ur reply I already installed Solaris 10 11/06 after formatting the only Hard Drive. Win XP & Solaris 10 dual boot is working just fine. Now for my second project I'm gonna work to install Solaris on 2nd HD.
Thanx again for ur detailed reply.
- Jags Desai
I use alternate boot managers for the "multiple disk boot" issue.
GAG http://gag.sourceforge.net/ (works very well)
| One of the clever things you can do with gag is to create your bootable options on a floppy disk, without touching your H/D. I think the reason I had to use BING is because the disk I wanted to boot was SATA, and the drivers weren't available for a gag deployment. That might be resolved by now.
BING http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/
Message was edited by: dickdunbar
