> I have heard (confirm this!) that OpenSolaris only > installs in the first 3-4 partitions. You should > confirm this.
Well, AFAIK, with an fdisk type label (i.e. not EFI), [Open]Solaris will only install/run from a _primary_ partition, not a _logical_ partition (although I'm told it can _access_ logical partitions just fine). Within the [Open]Solaris primary partition, it will place its own label. Solaris labels allow up to NDKMAP (16 on x86, 8 on SPARC) "slices". That is, on x86, the top-level label is either fdisk or EFI, and (at least within a Solaris primary fdisk partition), the Solaris label lives _within_ that partition, whereas on SPARC, the top-level label is either a Solaris label or an EFI label (top-level fdisk labels are possible on SPARC, but AFAIK one cannot boot from an fdisk-labelled disk on SPARC; they're really meant only for support of e.g. removable media with FAT filesystems). If the BIOS and the OS are both happy booting off of an EFI labelled disk, then I'm not so sure it matters whether or not it goes in one of the first four of (however many) partitions. I don't know whether any newer SPARCs can boot from an EFI labelled disk, but I'm pretty sure older ones can't, because at least older OpenBoot (analagous to BIOS for SPARC and some PowerPC systems) doesn't know anything about EFI labels. Please verify the above on your own - I may have gotten something wrong... [ Properly, EFI is the whole newer BIOS replacement scheme, and its partitions are GUID partition tables or GPT, but they're perhaps more often simply called EFI labels. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table for more info. ] -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
