Solaris 8 with Windows 98

Question

I am planning on installing the Solaris 8 media kit on my Windows 98, Pentium III computer. I would like to have both operating systems on the same hard drive. I am new to computers and am doing this for educational purposes - I would like to become a systems administrator. Please give any advice of what I need to do. If I have to partition my hard drive, how do I do this? What is the quickest way of backing up my hard drive?
Is there any problems of having 2 OS on the same hard drive? If so, what is the best and cheapest way to do this?

Answer 1

Hi,
When you run the 2.6 install program, it will ask you which partition you wish to use. On disk1, all you need to do is to create another partition on your existing disk. You can use Solaris boot manager to boot Solaris x86, NT, and Win 9x (among other systems).
To shrink an existing MS-DOS/MS Windows partition, if you need to make room, use something like Partition Magic.
Problems have been reported inter-working with OS/2, however. Reportedly, the order in which you install things is very important. Solaris doesn't "share" computers and partitions really well. If you have problems, you may need to install Solaris first, on a partition towards the end, reinstall the boot manager and add the partition. ======================================================================
On Solaris 2.x, use fdisk to find your disk partition table. For example, on an ATAPI drive, # fdisk /dev/rdsk/c0d0p0 would show something like the following:
Total disk size is 524 cylinders Cylinder size is 16065 (512 byte) blocks Cylinders Partition Status Type Start End Length % ========= ====== ============ ===== === ====== === 1 Solaris 0 260 261 50 2 Active Solaris 261 522 262 50
Where "Partition 1" was used for Windows 95. It was deleted and recreated with "Solaris" type. Make a ufs filesystem on the partition. (You can not subdivide this fdisk partition into Solaris slices). For example, # mkfs -F ufs /dev/rdsk/c0d0p1 4192965 where number 4192965 = 261 * 16065 is the total number of blocks on this partition, calculated as the cylinder length on this partition (261 from the above partition table) times the cylinder size (16065 blocks as shown in the header of the partition table.)
Mount the filesystem as usual. For example: # mount /dev/dsk/c0d0p1 /export/home ====================================================================== If you have another Operating System installed, boot into the other operating system (usually Windows or Linux). Select the current (non-Solaris) partition as the "Active" partition. Reboot. If the computer boots into the other operating system without the Solaris boot menu, you can safely delete the Solaris partition.
If you have no other Operating System installed, simply install another operating system over Solaris on the hard drive. Select "Entire disk" or similar during the installation. ======================================================================
if you any further comments or questions, kindly revert backup or send mail.
with thanks,
Mohammed Abid Ali, slashsupport.com pvt.ltd. Email :[email protected]