* Steven (accounts at stevengpeterson.net) wrote: > I formatted this nicely for readability and posted it on my blog. > Any help much appreciated! > > http://stevengpeterson.com/?aboutme&news2&27
You can't have 5 primary partitions (which is apparently what your hard drive has based on the partition table you listed). The max is 4, 3 if you designate one of the 4 to be an extended partition (of which you can have many more of). So, your partition table on that hard drive is 'out of spec' (this is an x86 disk spec that goes back to the days of DOS, nothing to do with OpenSolaris or any other OS for that matter). What I would do in your case is nuke partitions 3, 4 and 5 (if you can even find a partitioning tool that will let you fix a screwed up partition table like this) and then just leave the free space unpartitioned and install Solaris Express into that free space. The only caveat is that you'll lose your boot ability (since you're going to remove Solaris Express). I've run into situations like this in the past (screwed up partition tables). Recovery can be tricky. If it were me, I'd delete the partition entries I mentioned. Then set the Windows partition to be 'active'. You could try rebooting and see if things 'just work' at this point (ie Windows boots up) but I wouldn't bet on it. Then I'd boot the Windows XP install CD and get to the recovery console (which will hopefully find your existing windows installation) and then run fixmbr (and possibly fixboot). With any luck, after doing this you'll be able to reboot and Windows will load normally. Then you should have a 'clean' disk (at least as far as the partition table goes, you should have only 2 partitions which are 1 and 2 and are primary) to install Solaris Express to (which I'd make the partition for using Solaris Express during installation and not any of these partition editor programs like partition magic and whatnot). DISCLAIMER: There's very real risk that doing any of what I've outlined will completely destroy any possibility you have of recovering your Windows installation. This also is merely my 'notes' on how I personally have recovered from similar situations in the distant past and not any type of supported list of steps. No warranty is implied or given ;-) Cheers, -- Glenn
