Good Morning Folks. I bought a Sun ultra 40 some weeks ago, and have wanted to put it in service as a Linux/Windows 7 dual boot system. I am fine with Linux, or Solaris, but the rest of the family uses Win7/8/10 for photos and homework, and games. I have made what I thought was the only change to the bios to install Windows 7, but it will not install for love, or money. It gets toward the end, and has to reboot, and hangs. I have installed XP in it with no apparent problem. Anyone have a suggestion? I figured I must be overlooking a bios change, or the disk is bad. Help! Thanks.

Larry

Hardwareinfo?

What did you change in the BIOS? Is your BIOS firmware up to date?

I can only see one mention of putting Windows 7 on an Ultra 40, and that was some-one with the same problem - and no-one could help. That's hardly surprising, considering how few people would want to do it!

It could be a driver problem, but virtualisation may be the best answer.

Check out the Sun Ultra 40 service manual .pdf which should supply any info you need or at least point you to any other documentation required.
It looks like it supported RHEL4 and Suse SP3 in its day (Which probably doesn't mean it won't support newer versions, they just weren't available way back in 2008)

Hope this helps!

Play Bonny!

Hello again, guys. Sorry about the lack of info on my original post. My Sun Ultra 40 has two dual core, Opteron, 2.4ghz CPU, 16gb ram, 1tb hdd. The change I made to the bios was to stipulate that the OS was 'Windows', rather than 'other'. I can find no other changes that need to be made. I may have to make do with xp-64, but that isn't all that bad. The Linux side can be either Mepis or Mint, don't really care. The box is currently at a reliable shop. We'll see what they have to say tomorrow. Thanks for the responses.

Larry

Building on Soadyheird, generally listed supported distros in the Linux world mean the minimum OS version that can work with the hardware. Generally, if the Linux distro is decently newer than the hardware, support (usually built in) isn't much of an issue.

linux mint and unbuntu are the only 2 linux distros that i know of that are able to use UEFI with secureboot. If your not using these distros you cannot use UEFI with secureboot. If youre not using uefi youre using bios. To use bios enable legecy rom option and change boot order of whatever youre booting off of, to the top. Hope this helps

I don't think he's dealing with UEFI in his scenario (XP and 7 installed ok), plus I'm pretty sure at this point other distros like Fedora and openSUSE have at least some Secure Boot UEFI support.

OP - if everything's working fine, I'd mark this thread as "Solved".