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Quad boot: Windows 2k, XP, Linux, Solaris 10 x86

U

ugh

Platinum Member
Hi folks,

Was wondering if anyone here tried the above setup on one machine. I'm familiar with both Windows and Linux, but I'm not sure how to fit in Solaris x86.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Well, you can do it easy with VMware but that wouldn't be a true quad boot. you should be able to set up a quad boot easy enough using grub w/linux.

If I remember correctly, win2000 is very picky about where it is installed on the hard disk (what cylinder the install starts at) and some system bios' will not boot partions over a certain starting cylinder either. This may be old news or no longer a problem but it's worth checking into.

I've only ever tri booted myself...win98, win2000, and RH7's a couple years back...I used system commander but I dunno if that is even a commercial product anymore.
 
Possibly what I have is something like that. I have multiple (3) versions of XP, one W98 and two versions of linux. As long as you have separate parititions as the root and swap for each, several linux versions is not a problem. Since Solaris is a version of unix, I figure it may boot up similarly. (Keeping track of which partitions are going to belong to what during the set up of each may be confusing.) I just put the boot sectors for each on the designated root partitions, and use System Commander to boot that version. Recent versions of linux have loaders that do not have the 1024 cylinder limit. (Before that you needed to put the loader on a small "boot" partition which could then boot linux on a large partition beyond cylinder 1024.) IAC System Commander claims they can do Solaris, and practically anything else you can name.

Booting several versions of XP/2000/NT is not a problem. Each additional version simply adds itself to the NT boot menu, since NT always installs its boot manager. There are other ways to do this with System Commander, if you prefer, so you don't have to go through two stages of selection menues.

There are ways to configure the linux loaders to boot the boot sector of any partition, so if Solaris will put its boot sector on its own partition, you don't actually need a third party boot manager.
 
Originally posted by: KF
Possibly what I have is something like that. I have multiple (3) versions of XP, one W98 and two versions of linux. As long as you have separate parititions as the root and swap for each, several linux versions is not a problem. Since Solaris is a version of unix, I figure it may boot up similarly. (Keeping track of which partitions are going to belong to what during the set up of each may be confusing.) I just put the boot sectors for each on the designated root partitions, and use System Commander to boot that version. Recent versions of linux have loaders that do not have the 1024 cylinder limit. (Before that you needed to put the loader on a small "boot" partition which could then boot linux a large partition beyond cylinder 1024.) IAC System Commander claims they can do Solaris, and practically anything else you can name.

Booting several versions of XP/2000/NT is not a problem. Each additional version simply adds itself to the NT boot menu, since NT always installs its boot manager. There are other ways to do this with system Command, if you prefer, so you don't have to go through two stages of selection menues.

There are ways to configure the linux loaders to boot the boot sector of any partition, so if Solaris will put its boot sector on its own partition, you don't actually need a third party boot manager.
Click to expand...


Unless you need hardware 3d acceleration, VMware will save you a LOT of time.


 
SUOrangeman, has done this, I beleive. Actually, I think at one point he had 13 OS running.

Why do you need both 2000 and XP?
 
everything should be easy to do with Grub, except I don't know about Solaris.

How well does grub work with that?
 
>Unless you need hardware 3d acceleration, VMware will save you a LOT of time.
Don't they charge? OTOH I don't mind using pirated software. Do they have a key for it on astlavista, or one of the newgroups?

I never thought of trying Solaris that way. Solaris is free (I think), and it would be kind of wierd to buy VMware to try free software. But I understand there is not much choice of hardware for Solaris (and they want you to register the dowload, which is massive), and since VMware emulates hardware, you don't need to have the true hardware. Does Solaris support what VMware emulates?


It seems to me VMware has or had a demo version. I think I once attempted to run Windows 1.0 that way (just to see it.) Or maybe it was a freeware MSDOS emulator. An emulator was the only way I could figure out how to run it on present hardware.
 
Hehe. 13 OSes, no. I may have 13 partitions to support multiple OSes on one drive, however.

I have not had luck with Solaris at home, where I do most of my multi-booting. I've been on the AMD side of the world since the K7S5A was out and Solaris doesn't seem to like AMD that much. Granted, I have yet to try Solaris 9 (even though I have the x86 DVD).

Unless things have changed, Solaris requires a primary partition, which is usually a premium in a multi-boot system.

Thanks in part to some of my beta testing duties, I currently have FreeBSD 5.1, WinME/2K/XP/2K3Svr, and Gentoo Linux 1.4 running on my Raptor (yes, maybe 25GB in use at most). I've set aside room for Solaris and/or Darwin, the latter of which won't fully boot on my system 🙁.

-SUO, maybe I need to start a fan club!
 
>I may have 13 partitions to support multiple OSes

I was kind of surprised when I put the Knoppix CD in Sunday, and the hd's on the desktop went up to 18. hda18 that is. But the way linux counts throws in 3 extra. 2 for the 2 unallocated primaries, and 1 for the extended partition that contains the extended partitions. So it's only 15. I liked Knoppix so much I thought I might put another 2 partitions on the HD and put it on. I saw people recommend Knoppix quite a bit, but I figured it would take a long time to boot, maybe 5-10 minutes. After about a week of downloading, I finished on Sunday. To my surprise, I think it only took about a minute to detect everything and get to the KDE desktop.
 
Thanks for the info guys. Need to dig up a bit more on Solaris occupying the primary partition as SUOrangeman mentioned.

BTW, a little off topic question: Why do we need extended partitions on a HD?
 
Originally posted by: KF
>I may have 13 partitions to support multiple OSes

I was kind of surprised when I put the Knoppix CD in Sunday, and the hd's on the desktop went up to 18. hda18 that is. But the way linux counts throws in 3 extra. 2 for the 2 unallocated primaries, and 1 for the extended partition that contains the extended partitions. So it's only 15. I liked Knoppix so much I thought I might put another 2 partitions on the HD and put it on. I saw people recommend Knoppix quite a bit, but I figured it would take a long time to boot, maybe 5-10 minutes. After about a week of downloading, I finished on Sunday. To my surprise, I think it only took about a minute to detect everything and get to the KDE desktop.
Click to expand...

Knoppix is basicly Debian/unstable, just set up to run off of a CD/RAM and autodetect the hardware(using kudzu)....

 
Originally posted by: ugh
Thanks for the info guys. Need to dig up a bit more on Solaris occupying the primary partition as SUOrangeman mentioned.

BTW, a little off topic question: Why do we need extended partitions on a HD?
Click to expand...

Limitations in the BIOS stemming from the 8086/80286 days. Probably kept to ensure backward compatability or some such nonsense. The max partitions that a x86 bios can handle is 4. We divide the last partition up into various "virtual" partitions, hence the term extended partition.

Pretty stupid, but that's the nature of x86

The *BSD's work around this by only using 1 extended partition: "C" Then you can divide that up into how many BSD-partitions you feel like using.

 
Originally posted by: civad
Is that 18 hd or 18 partitions?
Click to expand...

Just 1 HD. 15 partitions on one HD, linux numbers them up to 18. There is supposedly no upper limit to the number of partitions. I've never attempted to find what the practical limit is.

hda3, and hda4 are missing because I only have 2 actual primary partitions, one of which is the extended partition.

hda2 is missing because it is an extended partition. It is a container for partitions from hda5 to hda18. You see there are two ways of designating a partition. The original method, and a later method that puts so-called logical partitions in one of the orginal type of partitions. When one of the original types is used as a container for logical partitions it is called an extended partition.

The original type of partitioning is a table with 4 entries located on the first sector of the HD. By putting it there, any booting system knows exactly where to find the info, and by sticking to the standard, any booting system knows how to treat the info. It is often the case that the partitioning utility which comes with an OS will not alter or remove any partition with a type designation it does not recognize, and will refuse to do anything at all with a non-standard partition table. That presents a problem if the partition table becomes corrupt or you just want to delete a foreign partition. For instance, years ago I tried to use fdisk to delete a linux partition, and it wouldn't

At some point HDs were about to become too large to be fully used by the original DOS file system. (over 128M?) Rather than create a file system to accomodate the HDs, MS decided to make one HD look like many HDs to the OS. To do this, they made use of a second partition, calling it an extended partition, and putting as many partitions within that as you like. By doing it that way, they kept to the old standard. The extended partition does not use a table listing all the partitions. That would put a limit on the number of partitions. Instead each partition has an entry saying if there is another partition beyond itself, and where that partition starts.

Of course now we have file systems that can accomodate over 128G without partitions. But partitions are useful for other reasons. They are a PITA even so.
 
The *BSD's work around this by only using 1 extended partition: "C" Then you can divide that up into how many BSD-partitions you feel like using.
Click to expand...

Not quite. BSD style disklables have always used only up to 8 partitions with 'c' being the entire disk, not an extended partiton. So in a way they're even more limited because there is no notion of an extended partition. But in reality you want to keep as few partitions around as possible, K.I.S.S., because using too many partitions can be worse than not enough.
 
From a WIndows/DOS perspective, FreeBSD requires at least one primary partition ... but can have many slices inside of that partition. So, it is very much like an extended partition, but it is not officially an extended partition in the DOS realm. I think Solaris x86 does the same thing.

-SUO
 
From a WIndows/DOS perspective, FreeBSD requires at least one primary partition ... but can have many slices inside of that partition. So, it is very much like an extended partition, but it is not officially an extended partition in the DOS realm. I think Solaris x86 does the same thing.
Click to expand...

It creates a BSD disklabel on that partition so it's still limited to 8 IIRC, I'm also 99% sure it doesn't have to be a primary partition but I could be wrong on that part.

It would make sense for Solaris to do the same, no use in Sun redoing the partition support in their OS. Solaris wasn't designed to run on anything but BSD disklabel'd disks so it would probably require some major overhauling to support 'normal' PC partition tables properly.
 
I remember creating a few primary partitions (if that's what you call it) in a hard disk before needing to have an extended partition. But of course, Windows98 will have trouble booting from it. Question is if Solaris is able to install/boot from a 2nd "primary" partition?
 
XOSL, GRUB, heck, even NT Loader will handle multi-booting with little to no effort.

I currently ise NT Loader, since MS is not nice enough to ask yo if want to install their boot loader. I figure it's just going to install it anyway.

-SUO
 
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