* John Smith (ma3x_smith at yahoo.com) wrote: > Hello: > > Lately I am into reading quite a lot about the project and quite > naturally wish to try it for myself. At the moment I have WinXP + > Ubuntu + Fedora installed on it ans wish to replace the Fedora with > OpenSolaris. > > So, the fdisk -l returns the following picture: > Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System > /dev/sda1 * 1 2550 20482843+ 7 HPFS/NTFS > /dev/sda2 2551 4474 15454530 83 Linux > /dev/sda3 4475 6386 15358140 83 Linux > /dev/sda4 6387 14593 65922727+ 5 Extended > /dev/sda5 6387 6434 385528+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris > /dev/sda6 6435 14593 65537136 7 HPFS/NTFS > > where you can see that > sda1 = WinXP > sda2 = Fedora > sda3 = Ubuntu > sda5 = swap > sda6 = NTFS data storage, accessible from all 3 current OS > > I carefully watched the screencasts located here > http://frsun.downloads.edgesuite.net/sun/07C00892/index.html In one of > them, although referring to Solaris Express, it says that should I > format partition X to Solaris, all subsequent partitions will be > erased? > > Please answer for me the following questions: > 1) Should I decide to install OpenSolaris on sda2, will this kill all > subsequent partitions and destroy the data on them?
No. > 2) If the answer to the above is "Yes", how should I proceed best, so > that I have WinXP + Ubuntu + OpenSolaris installed on my laptop? > 3) In the other screencasts I found online, I did not see option to > disable the automatic install of GRUB by OpenSolaris install. How can > this be achieved? I wish to keep the GRUB installed by Ubuntu and add > OpenSolaris in there, rather than replacing the existing with a fresh > OpenSolarish GRUB and add the existing OS in it. There isn't any way to not install the OpenSolaris version of grub to the MBR. Since the changes in GRUB that were added to support OpenSolaris haven't been accepted upstream, Ubuntu's GRUB won't understand how to boot OpenSolaris. So adding OpenSolaris to Ubuntu's GRUB won't work. What you can do is boot other systems (Ubuntu, WinXP, etc) from OpenSolaris's GRUB. You could install into /dev/sda2 (the installer should be able to handle this layout you have I believe). As with most computing tasks, make sure you have backups. While there shouldn't be a problem, you can never be too careful. Alternatively, if you just want to see what things are like you could always load VirtualBox (it's free) in Ubuntu or WinXP and then install OpenSolaris inside that. Cheers, -- Glenn
