Ok, this is my first experience with Solaris, so if it sounds like I don't know much .... I don't. Here goes. I want to try Solaris on my 160Gb SATA HD that has been partitioned into several smaller 10Gb sections for distributions I want to test. With all the linux distributions I have tried, the installation has aknowledged each partition, but Solaris only sees my drive as a 160 Gb hard drive. From what I could see, there wasn't any way to tell it to install on, say, sda5 or whatever. Was I doing something wrong, or will solaris only work on a hard drive by itself? Thanks in advance!

You should be able to partition the drive they way you want and install it. You don't see an option to partition it? Partitions aren't recognized as sda5/hda5 like in linux, it's more like c0t0d0s0 (c=controller, t=target, d=disk, s=slice).

-twantrd

Solaris is requiring a fdisk primary partition, you can have only 4 or these, or three if you use extended partitions. Beyond that it can coexist with other O/S in primary or secondary partitons.
sda5 is definitively a secondary partition.
Pay attention that Solaris may try to "adjust" your existing partitions not to cross a cylinder boundary or sth like that, always refuse it to do it if it asks for, that would make some of your partitions unreadable ... i.e. make backups before.

Thanks for the reply. I did notice the change in terminology there, but it didn't recognize any of my partitions, just one partition that was 160 Gb. So here's how my drive is laid out:

sda1 (primary): 20 Gb = windows xp
sda2 (swap): 1 Gb
sda3 (primary): 11 Gb = mandriva linux
sda4 (extended): rest of drive including these:
sda5 : 10 Gb = suse
sda6 : 10 Gb = debian
sda7 : 10 Gb = fedora core
sda8 : 10 Gb = this is where i want to put solaris
sda9 : 10 Gb = mandriva 2006
sda10 : 10 Gb = ubuntu
sda11 : 10 Gb = gentoo
sda12 : 10 Gb = xandros
sda13 : ~30 Gb = fat 32 shared space

After reading this post I'm thinking I should make it look something like this:

sda1 (primary): 20 Gb = windows xp
sda2 (swap): 1 Gb
sda3 (primary): 11 Gb = mandriva linux
sda4 (primary): 10 Gb = Solaris
sda5 (extended): rest is the same from here

but then you say this: "... it can coexist with other O/S in primary or secondary partitions.", which sounds contridictory at first. Do you mean the O/S it coexists with can be either on a primary or secondary partiions? I could put it on the 11 Gb primary that currently has Mandriva. Otherwise, I would have to re-do my whole drive, unless there is a way to turn one of those others into a primary.

Indeed an ambiguous sentence, I was answering to your question "or will solaris only work on a hard drive by itself?".

Your layout with the fourth primary partition for Solaris looks good to me.

There are other points you need to know before installing.

Solaris will overwrite your MBR to install its own, either a specific one with Solaris 10 or older, or an enhanced Grub with Solaris express or Open Solaris based distributions. The next Solaris 10 release (update 1) will also use Grub.

You should make sure before installing Solaris to have a bootloader installed on sda3, so you can chainload it from the Solaris one.

Finally, there may be issues with the upper limit of the fourth partition, as Solaris and Linux sometimes disagree on the disk space available to the O/S.

So again, back-up everything sensitive, including bootloaders and the MBR.

You should also try first a Solaris live distro to make sure your H/W is supported.

Googled "solaris live cd", nothing obvious came up. Any idea where I could get a live cd? Thanks for your helpful replies, by the way.

I just found BeleniX - might that work for testing my hardware?

There are currently three OpenSolaris based live distributions, schillix, belenix and nexenta.

Nexenta is the closer to what Linux users are familiar with, userland programs are mostly Gnu based, like Gnu/Linux, it's a Debian/Ubuntu distro really, while schillix and belenix are primarily using the original unix utilities.

Any one of these should check your H/W against Solaris kernel/drivers.

Thanks, jlliagre, I will download one of them and see what happens.

OK, well I downloaded BeleniX and everything seemed fine except for my NIC. It's on-board on an ASUS P5P800. Keyboard, monitor, vid card, mouse all work fine. I didn't try to print. I also couldn't check the sound (it's AC97). I'm guessing that if I install solaris onto my hard drive that my nic won't work with that either. What are my chances to get it working?

Do you on what chip you NIC is based ?
If it's not supported, you can buy any realtek PCI board and it should work.

To answer I consulted the output of lspci, which is this for the NIC:

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Gigabit Ethernet Controller

If you find a good hardware compatability list for solaris, paste the link. Thanks!

Marvell NICs may be supported with some tweaking:
http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?thr...essageID=90637