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To Prepare your hard-drive for Solaris, you need
to know about standard PC partition tables and
about Solaris disk slices. In this HOWTO I talk
about single-disk systems only, but all the
information should also apply to a multi-disk
environment.
The standard partition-table has only 4 entries. The
entries important for us are the following:
- A Primary Partition
Takes up one entry, and contains exactly one
partition. A waste of resources, but the only partition
you can boot from!
- An extended Partition
Takes up one entry, but can
contain multiple DOS, Linux, and other partitions
- A Solaris Partition
Takes up one entry,
but can contain multiple Solaris Partitions
To find out what partitions are present on your system, use
the fdisk program. Partitions numbers 1 to 4
(hda1 ..4 , sda1 ..4 , ...) are the ones
in your partition table.
Solaris has its own partitioning scheme. It
uses one entry in the partition table, and
this entry is and acts as this partition would
be the entire disk.
This virtual disk is then divided in up to 8 slices. The
third slice, s2, covers the whole virtual disk, so you
actually have up to 7 slices for Solaris.
Unfortunately, the Solaris partition entry has the same
type as a Linux Swap partition (82). Therefore, you should
not have any Linux swap partitions as primary
partitions. Linux doesn't care about this, but who knows
what Solaris does?
Although the Linux fdisk program has some ``Sun
disklabel'' support, this doesn't seem to help any.
Of course, Solaris needs disk space. The minimum
installation of Solaris 8 is about 300 MB. For the normal
tools its about 700 MB, and for a ``developer-system'' about
1 GB.
But this is only the space required for the base
installation. You might want to add a lot of GNU-Tools, and
other stuff. And if you want to share data between Solaris
and Linux, this has to happen on the Solaris partitions.
You might even think of sharing your home directories
between Solaris and Linux. As the time of this writing:
Forget it! I messed up my home directory doing so and I was
very happy about my backup. See also section
sharing data
Here's the quick check list. Make sure you:
- have used no more than 3 entries in your partition table
- have no Linux swap partitions as primary partitions
- Have at least 1 Linux ext2 partition as primary
- Have at least 1 GB unpartitioned space
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