> I installed OpenSolaris on a SATA drive on KN9 SLI > motherboard. It worked fine.
Did you tell the OpenSolaris installer to use the whole disk (default) or just a certain amount of it (e.g. 40GB)? > I then installed > gNewSense linux on the next partition OK, so it sounds like you made the OpenSolaris partition smaller than the whole disk and left room for gNewSense Linux. How did you allocate space on your hard disk for gNewSense Linux? In other words, which option did you choose in the gNewSense installer when it asks you to partition the disk (Step 5 in the documentation here: http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Documentation/InstallingGNewSense ). Only the last 2 options ("Use the largest continuous free space" and "manually edit partition table") will preserve an existing OpenSolaris install. - now only > linux boots, I don't get an option to chose. >From reading the documentation, it seems that the gNewSense installer does not >give you the choice of where to install the bootloader (GRUB), so it will most >likely have set the new Linux partition as active, and put a GRUB stage 1 into >the MBR (first sector of the hard disk - where the BIOS will attempt to boot >the disk from). From there the GRUB stage 1 will find the active partition >(your linux partition) and load the stage 2 grub from the Linux partition. The only version of GRUB which can read ZFS (pools and) filesystems is the version of GRUB that comes with OpenSolaris (and newer versions of Solaris 10). This was labelled GNU GRUB version 0.95 in older builds, but was upgraded to 0.97 fairly recently. This is NOT THE SAME as the Gnu GRUB 0.95 and 0.97 used by some Linux distributions - it has been modified by Sun with various bugfixes as well as having basic ZFS reader support added. For reasons best known to themselves, Sun did not bother to modify the version string printed out at the top of the GRUB menu, hence it appears to the untrained eye just like a stock GNU GRUB 0.95 or 0.97 build (which, as I said, it is *not*). Newer versions of GRUB, including 1.x, do not include ZFS reader support and will be unable to boot OpenSolaris. Can you disconnect your USB drive, then boot the gNewSense install CD and choose to manually partition the disk (as shown in stage 5 here: http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Documentation/InstallingGNewSense )? This will let you see exactly what partitions you have on the disk. If you could make a note then post that information here we can then advise on whether you are likely to still have a viable OpenSolaris partition on the disk. Cheers Andrew. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
