Dual boot, now upgrading WinXP to Win7. GRUB problems?
 

I am using dual boot, Solaris 11 Express and WinXP. Now I want to upgrade WinXP to Win7. How do I do that? What are the steps?

If I format the WinXP partition and make a clean install of Win7, it will over write the GRUB. This means I can not access Solaris anymore. I must somehow fix GRUB. How to do this? Does it suffice to activate the Solaris partition in Win7 - and GRUB will automatically load?

A new Win7 installation won't pick up Solaris, and I wouldn't imagine success from anything you can do from within Win7. MS go out of their way to make sure Windows won't play with other vendors' OS's.

If it were a linux OS rather than solaris you could intall Win7, then boot into a linux live environment, mount --bind your /proc and /dev filesystems from the installed OS, chroot into the new environment, then reinstall grub into the MBR. Grub would then pick up both OS's and you're done. I have done this before and it does work (with linux).

Whether solaris is the same I don't know. If it has the same arrangement of /proc and /dev filesystems etc then this should work. I would think ;)..

Well it does! Here are the steps one has to follow:

1. Start OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana LiveCD and select second "text console" option.

2. Select Language (not important!).

3. Login - Live CD user is "jack" and password "jack", then switch to
root "su -", password is "opensolaris" or "openindiana" depending on which
LiveCD you have used to boot.

4. Check if see what is the name of the "basic" zfs pool with

# zpool import

Remember that the default name is "rpool"

5. Import this pool with

# zpool import -f rpool

6. Find the active boot environment (BE) with

# beadm list.

You will something like the following table:

BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
-- ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
opensolaris-7 NR / 72.53G static 2010-12-18 15:38


7. Mount the active BE under /a

mkdir /a; beadm mount opensolaris-7 /a

8. Intsall grub with the following command:

# /a/sbin/installgrub /a/boot/grub/stage1 /a/boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c0d0s0

To find out what is the device name of your hard disk partition use

# iostat -En
c13t0d0 Soft Errors: 0 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0
Vendor: ATA Product: WDC WD6400AAKS-6 Revision: 3B01 Serial No:
Size: 640,14GB <640135028736 bytes>

Here the name is c13t0d0 and so the device is /dev/rdsk/c13t0d0s0

9. Umount the BE with

# beadm unmount opensolaris-7; sync;sync

10. Reboot with

# init 6

That all.