Getting Solaris 10
 

Hey all

I need your help in something, as I'm a Linux junkie but a Solaris noob. I'm currently working with an 80 GB hard drive with Windows XP (ugh) installed on a (single) primary partition and Fedora Core 4 on extended partitions. Grub is my bootloader.

I'm downloading Solaris 10 at the moment. I read somewhere that you can't install Solaris 10 on an extended partition, so that means I have to get rid of Windows due to a lack of space (good riddance). Is that a risky thing to do? Because I can't afford losing the important data I have, which is all on extended partitions. And will there be any issues concerning booting Linux and Solaris? Will I be able to continue using Grub, or will I have to use the Solaris bootloader? Which would be a better choice?

Is there anything I need to take care of during installation or is it pretty straightforward? Can I simply install Solaris over Windows or do I have to format the partition first using QParted? Is there any danger in screwing up the MBR because I have one single primary partition?

I also have a Microsoft USB optical mouse. I heard that there might problems with compatibility, how do I solve that?

Forgive the torrent of questions and any stupid ones.
Thanks in advance :)

-A

There will be others that can answer you better, but here's a start ...

I installed Solaris 10 off a DVD from a magazine cover. If you're careful, seems to be o.k. with the disk usage.
*Don't* accept the default else it'll eat the entire disk - not good if you have anything else on it.

ISTR if wouldn't load to the (secondary) SATA disk - might have been just me getting something wrong.

As for the loader, ISTR it didn't give you an option - it just wrote its own to the MBR. I put grub back (Ubuntu on that box), and just chainloaded Solaris as if it was XP. Worked o.k.

Played with it for a few days, but didn't offer me enough to keep it.
Space has been reclaimed for other test installs.

@syg00:
Thanks for the tips. As with every Linux installation I've undergone, I haven't let it do the partitioning automatically. Talking about partitioning, I have an idea how much space to create for filesystems in Linux (e.g. /home, /usr, /tmp, / (root) , etc..). What do I need to do in Solaris, do I leave the whole space for the root filesystem or how should I divide it up? I have exactly 10000 MBs on the partition.

Thanks

-A

The simplest way is to give 512 MB or 1Gig to the swap slice (s1) and all the remaining space to / (slice 0), leave slice 2 (overlap) alone. Then you are sure you didn't undersized one important directory.

One advice:
If the installer ask you to allow it to adjust the partition boundaries not to cross cylinders, refuse it and resume installing, or you seriously risk loosing one or more partition and the data inside them ...

One more advice:
You wrote you can't afford loosing data present on your disk.
If it is really the case, do not try to install any operating system or to run any external partitioner before having completed a backup of this data, and cheked the backup is usable ... you've been warned.
This is not Solaris specific, I had Solaris data wiped out after linux installation (too).
Different O/Ses have different ways to gather disk geometry ...

Ok thanks! I've learned my lesson with undersizing the hard way :D

-A