Does the Solaris 10 installer have to wipe the whole hard drive?
 

I have my hard drive split into 3 chunks:- NTFS Windows XP partition, FAT32 Documents partition and unformatted space. How do you get the Solaris 10 installer to use this unpartitioned space, rather than letting it use the hole hard drive?

I have installed solaris 10 twice and the partitioning tool, can use free space on your hard drive to create solaris partitions. I can't remember the exact procedure, but its pretty straightforward.

AFAIR, Solaris 10 installer shows all the partitions, and lets us choose the partition for Solaris 10 installation. That's how I'm able to make my system dual boot with JDS Linux & Solaris 10.

Hi Eerath,

Heres how it works just incase you havent figured it out already :-

The solaris boot loader is a very bad one if you compare it to GRUB in Linux and so on ; because it uses fdisk and fdisk recognizes only 4 primary partitions . Now from what I understand ; this is how u hav ur disk :-

Partition 1 : NTFS (Main windoze)
Partition 2 : D:/ (Allyour data)
The rest is unformatted space..Sure Solaris shd work no problems at all...!!!

This is how u du it :-

Boot fro m Solaris CD n get to the place where it asks you to create a partition :-

u shd see something like this :-
1......win95/unknown
2......unknown..
3
4

Basically the entries will differ...but the point is ur blank space will show at the bottom of ur list...if u hav ur c: and d: beind each othr in the partition table.
In 3 create a 11-15 MB large x86 partition ...I think its f4 to change type of partition.

In 4 create a "SOLARIS" (F4 again)....partition with whatver space u hav left...ur data on Windoze is not gonna go...dont worry( :) )...Let solaris install ...put in the second CD...install the s/w ...reboot ...and u get a Blue boot up screen which has entries for WIndows and SOalris ...Just hit ENter it'll go to Soalris ...enter the partition for Windows (mostly this shd be 1) and ENter it'll go to WIndows....hope this helps...buzz back if u still need help...

Arvind
p.s...Hopefully the explanation wasn't too complicated...:)

Thanks, Solaris wasnt recognising the free space I had because I had formatted it as unformatted (If you see what I mean) in Partition Magic. Ill try again.

This is unrelated.
Solaris is indeed requiring a primary partition to boot from, but this has nothing to do with grub.
Actually solaris express nv16 use grub as its boot loader. Grub has been enhanced by a Sun contribution to allow it.

Uh oh. Installed Solaris to the free space, but I have a serious compatability error with the X server. Partition Magic doesnt recognise SOLARIS partitioning, so that wont load up. How do I get rid of Solaris?

Not sure to understand the relationship between Partition magic and the X server ...

Do you mean you give up because you haven't managed to have the X server running ?

If true, you can wipe out the Solaris partition from any partitioning tool, well probably any but Partition magic, which seems anaware of the Solaris2 new tag and err on it. You probably can even do it from inside Solaris with its fdisk, although I never attempted that kind of self destructing command.

Perhaps a way to have PM working again would be to change back the Solaris partition ID to the old one, with grub.

Thanks :) I used Mepis to sort it out, and have fallen in love (and the X server loads correctly, unlike most *nix distros!)