On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 7:22 AM, Uwe Dippel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Thanks, Dave, for your confirmation of my intentions and assumptions, at > least in general: > > 1. "The limitation in handling multiple Solaris fdisk partitions is a > function of the disk target driver." This is what I was thinking: In order > to handle a slice, you pick it up using the disk target driver. The latter > only knows about one slice on a target, right. > > 2. (Thanks to Kyle), installation into another partition is 'safer'; > exactly the reason why I wanted to do that in the first place, having hosed > two installs in a single partition, while my Indiana-Preview in another > partition was a success (aside from its lack of usability, which is why I > simply fdisk-ed that partition. See, yet another reason with respect to > adoption). Especially "the previews are not aimed at existing Solaris users" > should make them *easy* to be used. As well as by the Linux-crowd, and the > Solaris-crowd. Back to square 1: Another target is needed. If the kernel > were to pick up the slices from within the partition into which grub points > it at boot, like the installer, everything would be fine. > (I don't pretend to know how easy this would be, though.) > > Uwe > > After many years of using Solaris and Linux I know what your frustrations are about, but I want to assure you that multi-booting (dual-booting, or what ever term you want to use), is quite possible, have been possible for many years, and works with only a single Solaris partition on a single disk. This is by using multiple Slices in that partition. Resizing of Slices and partitions is not always possible, but it can be done in some cases. Live-upgrade can help in some situations (to move the running OS instance to a smaller slice, for example) You may find that you need to re-partition and in some cases re-installing may be easier than trying some fool-jiggery to save an instance) Planning for multiple Solaris instances will go a long way, but the new Solaris installer makes it particularly difficult to set up multiple bootable Solaris instances on a single disk. In planning to do this I would recommend that you use the text based installer in stead because it offers more flexibility, at the cost of some "slick"-ness in the interface. Installing to an empty slice in the Solaris partition is perfectly safe. Just make sure that a) the slice is indeed free, and b) the slice does not overlap any data that you want to preserve. Those checks must be done before you start the installation of the second Solaris OS. Much of this will become moot with ZFS, mostly because re-partitioning is irrelevant. However as long as someone might want to use an older Solaris that do not support ZFS boot, it will remain necessary to have a few "hard" slices on the disk to contain file systems for those. I hope this helps Cheers, _Johan
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