Installing Open Solaris and Open Suse 10.2 on same disk problem

devn · 10-05-2007, 12:48 AM

Hi,
I am in the trouble of installing Open Solaris and Open Suse on same disk. My PC arch is as follows:

- Intel Pentium D (2.8 GHz)
- 1 GB DDR2 RAM
- 230 GB SATA and 78 GB SATA HDD
- 1 DVD writer and a CD Writer on same IDE

I have installed WinXP on the primary HDD (230 GB) and Open Solaris on the secondary (78 GB). I gave 35 GB to Solaris and remaining space is actually free, where I want to install Suse. But in the installation procedure for Suse, it doesn't show the free space, rather the entire hard drive, i.e. 78 GB. I am not partitioning it from Suse, cause I dont wanna lose Solaris. And I dont want to touch my primary HDD. I know that Solaris points the entire disk on slice 2 (eg c0t0d0s2) as its entire disk.

Is there any way I can get Solaris not point entire disk on slice 2. I guess that would sort the problem. I have not tried anything with format and resizing yet.
And here is my format partition output:

Code:

Part      Tag    Flag     Cylinders        Size            Blocks
  0       root    wm    5263 - 7175       14.65GB    (1913/0/0)  30732345
  1       swap    wu       3 -  133        1.00GB    (131/0/0)    2104515
  2     backup    wm       0 - 9725       74.50GB    (9726/0/0) 156248190
  3 unassigned    wm       0               0         (0/0/0)            0
  4 unassigned    wm       0               0         (0/0/0)            0
  5 unassigned    wm       0               0         (0/0/0)            0
  6 unassigned    wm       0               0         (0/0/0)            0
  7       home    wm    7176 - 9725       19.53GB    (2550/0/0)  40965750
  8       boot    wu       0 -    0        7.84MB    (1/0/0)        16065
  9 alternates    wu       1 -    2       15.69MB    (2/0/0)        32130

Someone please help

jlliagre · 10-05-2007, 01:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by devn

I gave 35 GB to Solaris and remaining space is actually free

Actually, you gave Solaris the whole disk, or more precisely, a partition spanning the whole disk.

Quote:

But in the installation procedure for Suse, it doesn't show the free space, rather the entire hard drive, i.e. 78 GB.

Suse correctly detects your disk has no spare space.

Quote:

I am not partitioning it from Suse, cause I dont wanna lose Solaris.

Yes, any action from Suse would made your Solaris filesystems unreachable.

Quote:

I know that Solaris points the entire disk on slice 2 (eg c0t0d0s2) as its entire disk.

This the case on SPARC hardware only. With x86 H/W, the whole disk is c0t0d0p0.

Quote:

Is there any way I can get Solaris not point entire disk on slice 2.

Yes, you can have slice 2 not to point to the entire Solaris partition as it is just a convention, but that wouldn't be enough to recover some disk space.

Quote:

I guess that would sort the problem. I have not tried anything with format and resizing yet.

The main issue is your Solaris partition isn't used contiguously, so you can't shrink it from one end or the other.
Cylinders 0 to 133 are used by the boot and the swap areas while cylinders from 5263 to 9725 are used by your filesystems.

The solution would be to move these 2 last partions (0 and 7) to the free area starting from slice 134 and then shrink s2 and p1 but as there are no tools to automatize the process, you would have to edit by hand the partition and slice table, I'm afraid it would be extremely difficult to achieve the task without loosing all the data.

You may wan't to try that if you have enough space on another disk to store the whole disk image (78 GB) thus to rollback to the initial situation should something goes wrong.

devn · 10-05-2007, 02:49 AM

Dear jlliagre,

Thanks for the quick reply. Well, moving slices to make my disk contiguous for solaris looks a lot of backup and restoration job to do. Well, I could attempt that provided the backup slice actually releases the free space. Is there any way I can do that while I am installing a fresh copy of Solaris? I mean is there a way to slide cylinders to point only the part of disk I want it to while I am partitioning disk from installation menu?

Or should I install Suse first then?
If possible, could you give me specific suggestions on how to format filesystem (the free space after done installing Suse) so that Solaris finds it for installing itself after I install Suse. And is it possible to have the same swap for Suse and Solaris? I did it for Linux (two different distros) before.

Well, I guess I ask too many questions.

Please help.

devn · 10-05-2007, 03:31 AM

Dear jlliagre,

I am attempting to shift my slices. Here is what I am going to do. Correct my steps if wrong:

Well, from the calculations, I am going to do this new cylinder struct:
root = 134 - 2047 (cylinders)
home = 2048 - 4598 (cylinders)
backup = 0 - 4598 (cylinders)

create filesystem and mount them with different names e.g / as /root_bck and so for home.
My vfstab contains the following entries:

Code:

/dev/dsk/c2d0s0 /dev/rdsk/c2d0s0        /       ufs     1       no      -
/dev/dsk/c2d0s7 /dev/rdsk/c2d0s7        /export/home    ufs     2       yes

Will change it to:

Code:

/dev/dsk/c2d0s3 /dev/rdsk/c2d0s3        /       ufs     1       no      -
/dev/dsk/c2d0s4 /dev/rdsk/c2d0s4        /export/home    ufs     2       yes

But the problem is, how to copy slice 0 exactly to slice 3? And same for slice 7?

After reboot, system should now be booted with mounted filesystems from slice 3 and 4.
Should I then change backup slice (slice 2) to 4598 and remove slice 0 and 7?
How risky is that?

Help me out guys...