I have a few questions about the planned support for extended partitioning in OpenSolaris. At the slim install meeting a couple of weeks back someone mentioned that they had successfully installed Solaris onto a logical volume inside an extended partition but the system couldn't be booted after installation. I've been doing some investigations of my own and from my limited understanding it seems that it's not possible to directly boot from a logical volume/partition. The PC bios will read the MBR and find the active primary partition. It will then pass over control to the boot record inside the active primary partition. It seems you need to either overwrite the MBR with a custom boot loader program, or create a primary active partition that contains a boot loader capable of booting the OS on the logical volume/partition.
Can anyone clarify on what the plan to support booting from extended partitions is, the basic mechanism and if there are any implications from a partitioning perspective? Thanks, Niall. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
