A small contrib to share some painfull experience... I’ve tried to install OpenSolaris Release sol-nv-b64a-x86 on my Dell XPS 210 preinstalled with Vista Premium Edition 32 Bit.
Step 1 : Change the 'SATA Operation' BIOS setting from 'AHCI' to 'ATA'. My XPS210 was equipped with a SATA Disk configured to work with the AHCI. It was impossible to boot. The workaround is described there: http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5191025&tstart=60 Step 2 : Prepare a new empty primary partition to install OpenSolaris DELL had partitioned my SATA disk with 3 Primary Partition. Vista was installed on the third primary partition. Partition 1 (EISA Configuration) is apparently on all DELL machines and used to put some hidden DELL Tools… Partition 2 : a recovery partition to recover your DELL system Partition 3 : the rest of the disk with Vista installed. I’ve used with no problem the Vista “diskmgmt” tools to reduce the size of the Third partition to free some space for the fourth primary partition I will use to install OpenSolaris. Step 3 : Before installing OpenSolaris, be sure to be correctly prepared !!!! Especially if you don’t want to have the same bad experience than mine, read carefully the following threads: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=34844&tstart=0 http://linux.wordpress.com/2007/02/17/vista-and-solaris-express-dual-boot If not, you will have some troubles to boot Vista after the installation of OpenSolaris. Personally I was not prepared at all (I was to confident because the day after I was able to dual boot Vista and a Fedora 7 on the same Dell machine). So, it happened what it must happened : impossible to boot vista again After lots a manipulation, I was able to boot again my original Vista OS, but then… • I discovered (later) that the UUID of partition 2 and Partition 3 were swapped somewhere in the middle “battle”. This means that my C: drive was the “Recovery Partition” and my D: drive the Vista Partition. By chance, I was still able to login on Vista (yes, I know, it’s unbelievable but…) Due to the parition swap, my User Profile was unable to load anymore (mainly because lots of DLL were missing on the C:\windows\system32). I’ve solved this problem with the Registry Editor Utility ‘C:\Windows\System32\regedt32.exe’ (which was on D: drive for me at that point), thanks to the Microsoft Article 223188: I had “simply” to swap the UUID of partition C: and partition D: and reboot to solve my problem. The keys to modified can be found there in the Windows Registry : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices In my case Id had to swap the content of key “\DosDevices\C:” with content of key \DosDevices\D: Reboot and enjoy Vista again... As far as I know, I’ve just lost all the registry backups of my C: drive during all this process. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list [email protected]
