Solaris 10 installation hangs; multi-OS drive
 

I have a Dell D820 laptop with Windows XP and Fedora 6 installed on the hard drive. I downloaded the DVD image of Solaris 10 and this is what happens when I boot to the DVD:

1. "Loading Stage 2" is displayed
2. Options to run Solaris, Solaris Serial Con ttya, Solaris Serial ttyb
3. "..........." is displayed
4. The final message is: "Sun OS Release 5.10 version generic_11885-33 32-bit Copyright 1983-2006 Sun Micro Inc.
User is subject to license terms"

At this point the installation proceeds no further.

Apparently there are some issues with installing Solaris on a drive that already has Linux partitions. fdisk in Fedora says:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 3187 25599546 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 3188 4231 8385930 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 4232 4492 2096482+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

There's not much to help on the Web, but I did find these:


Since I am a Linux novice, I cannot really make heads or tails out of these instructions. Could anyone tell me what I need to do to get Solaris to exist on the same drive as Windows and Linux? Thanks very much.

As the installation hangs when loading the O/S from the DVD, the issue is not (yet) with disk partitioning.

Have a look at the Solaris HCL http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data...ails/2043.html. In the notes, there is some tweaking mentioned about Solaris on the D820:

I had to disable acpi (acpi-user-options=0x2). It's required also to set tsc_gethrtime_enable to 0 in order to install (under kmdb tsc_gethrtime_enable/W0). I wonder if he was able to completely get ACPI working at all or he just forgot to make a note about it.

Thanks; that's a good find. Would you have any idea how to disable ACPI on a Dell D820? I looked in the BIOS and didn't see anything. I'll check w/Google and see what I come up with; I'll post anything substantial I find in this thread. Thanks.

Sure, you need to add this at the end of the kernel line in the grub menu kernel entry:
or possibly as you are booting the DVD.

Another option would be to try Solaris Express where this ACPI limitation is likely to be fixed.

I poured through pages of Google search results and the Dell forums, and I don't think that ACPI can be disabled on the Dell Latitude D820. There is definitely no option in the BIOS to do so.

Okay, right now my grub.conf in /boot/grub looks like this:

Are you saying it should look like this:

Or do I have to edit grub.conf during the boot-to-DVD installation? It does give me the option to go to a command prompt during the installation, I believe.

I will definitely give Solaris Express a try if I can't install the regular Solaris 10. I am just interested in using Solaris from a server OS/networking perspective and not for any software application development; would Express be appropriate for my needs? Thanks very much.

Yes, that's it.
Indeed, press "e" when the boot menu appears, and you get to the edit mode.
"<esc>" leave the edit mode
"b" launch the boot process.
Unless you have support constraints and requirements, Solaris Express is a better option, especially with a laptop.

Editing the grub kernel line during the installation did the trick:

However, when I got to the fdisk portion of the installation, it gave me a message about detecting Linux and it said that Solaris cannot use Linux partitions or something like that?

Currently when I boot the computer, it loads grub.conf from /boot/grub and lets me choose between Fedora 6 and Windows XP. Will I be able to install Solaris so that it will get its own partition(s) and have an entry for itself in the grub.conf file, so that I'll have three OS choices on bootup? Currently my disk looks like:

You should post the exact message.
That is supported.
So it looks like you have a free primary partition, but is there some free space available on your disk ? Is sda3 really a swap partition for Linux ? That may be the issue you had with Solaris fdisk as its ID clash with the previous Solaris partition ID.

Jlliagre, thanks for all your help with this problem. Since I have two hard drives, I decided to put Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE on one and Windows XP, Solaris, and FreeBSD on the other. Do you know of any potential difficulties that may occur if Windows and Solaris share the same drive? How about Solaris with FreeBSD? I plan on having one NTFS partition for Windows and then just let Solaris install into a separate partition(s) on its own with the autoinstallation option. Thanks.

Install Windows first as it overwrites the MBR with something that can't boot Solaris.
Nothing special, they mostly ignore each other, unless you choose to have a shared ZFS partition which would be a very interesting experience (I didn't yet try that).
I would advice not to use the default filesystems settings, especially the default slicing which creates a / to small, and unnecessary separate slices.

What would you advise then? I'll be installing Solaris 10 onto a 40 GB drive that already has a 25 GB NTFS partition. Which partitions should I create and what sizes?

Before I learn more about solaris, i just have 3 partitions, everything in "/" and one "swap" and one for "/var". That works and is the easiest.

That depends on what you plan to install on the box. With (only) 15 GB, here's what I would do:

give / 8 GB (including /var, /usr, ...), swap 1 GB and create a fake ufs /export with the remaining space (6GB).

After installation, umount /export and replace it by a zfs pool created on this slice. On the pool, create a compressed file-systems for /opt and other filesystem for the home directory/ies and for the zone(s).

If you are using the latest Solaris Express, then you can try the new ZFS boot support and put everything on ZFS, which would be the best solution (although I haven't tried it yet).

Hi jlliagre,

I finally installed Solaris and now it seems I'm having the same problem that I had when I first attempted to install. When I boot my laptop I get the Solaris GRUB screen which gives me three choices:

Solaris 10
Solaris failsafe
Windows

When I boot to either Solaris option, it goes to "User is subject to license terms" and then just hangs.

I tried to edit the GRUB entries by adding ",acpi-user-options=0x2" at the end but I just get error messages afterwards. I even tried adding a separate ACPI line and that also didn't work. When I edit the first GRUB line entry, the choices are:

root (hd0, 1, a)
kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot
module/platform/i86pc/boot_archive

Any suggestions? Thanks.

The expected syntax should be: