On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 12:27:08PM +0530, Manish Chakravarty wrote: > > > > The confusing thing here is your statement of "C" and "D" > > drives which under Windows means one primary (C) and rest > > extended logical (D). You would probably be requiring a > > system with primary partitions clearly redone and marked, > > with the extended divided into few logicals, to take care > > of the swap partition for Linux as well. Will get back on > > this issue on getting the output of your 'fdisk -l' under > > Ubuntu live. > > Sorry for the confusion. I have three partitions on my HDD > All of them primary. > > The first two are the C and D drives on windows. third and > The last partition is the solaris partion > > I want to split the second one into two using linux fdisk to > create the swap and / partiotions and install linux there > Thus I would end up with four primary partitions, which is > ok. >
Linux fdisk would not split the partition in between without deleting it in toto, and recreating them all over again. Such a thing is possible if there is not much data in the second partition. It may be proper to repartition your hard disk all over again. Since an IDE HDD can take a max of four primary partitions, or three primary partitions and one extended you may like to convert your second partition to extended, so that you can have logicals under it, to cater for a swap partition, and retain rest of it as "D" drive under Windows as before. The other option is to have four partitions and use a swap file under Linux (Ubuntu), if you break up the second partition and have four primaries. Using a file for swap needs to be done by hand after installing Ubuntu, and I am not sure if the Ubuntu install process would go through without a swap. If that bit goes throug, you are swinging ! A swap file does just as fine as a dedicated partition for swap under Linux. The easiest would be to delete all partitions except for the first one housing Windows (C), and create two more primaries and one extended. If the extended one is broken into more logicals, you can use it to store data both under windows and linux. Since Solaris keeps all its stuff in slices, and not seperate partitions, it would be prudent to give this partition a bit more of the disk space. > > > > And don't get stuck up on grub issues, if that poses > > problems. If your Windows partition is 32 bit, you can use > > an alternate boot loader called xosl: > > http://www.ranish.com/part/xosl.htm > > > > Or, if you want to make it independent, you may use GAG: > > http://gag.sourceforge.net/ > > > I'll have to take a look at GAG and XOSL. > > Otherwise I like the solution proposed by Shiv and Anil > > 1) Install UBuntu > 2) Copy the conents of Ubuntu's menu.lst somewhere. > 3) Rescue Solaris GRUB using Indiana/Belenix livecd > 4) Add entry for Ubuntu to Solaris GRUB > Both Linux and Solaris grub can actually "see" the other partitions. Unfortunately, grub does not use the partition type identifier. It needs the boot record placed in the boot sector of the partition. Neither Solaris nor Linux by default writes its boot record in the partition, and only the MBR. If you manually write the boot record to the partition from the grub prompt, it will automatically be picked up by Linux grub during installation of Ubuntu. The same is also true for Solaris grub, and can pick up Linux partitions if the boot record is placed there. AFAIK, except for Slackware, no other Linux distro gives the option of writing the boot record to the partition on installation, and needs to be done manually. In any case, you can always add appropriate entries manually to the grub.conf or menu.lst, whichever is applicable in your case, as stated by you from the Solaris grub instal. That would always work... Best wishes, Bish
