Solaris Dual Booting with Vista

Well I've been on what feels like an epic journey and wanted to document my findings in the event it can help someone else.

In hindsight it all seems pretty easy and straight forward but it certainly didn't at the time of my original post.

To answer the original question, the post provided kindly above documents the fact that Windows Vista needs to be the active partition to be able to hibernate correctly.

With Vista as the active partition, the Vista bootloader is then needed to be able to boot the Solaris image. Thankfully, EasyBCD is available that does just this:

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

However there is something which tripped me up for quite a while which I didn't readily find information for. After installing EasyBCD, I was always getting corrupted BCD errors, cannot open BCD configuration file etc. I was convinced my Vista installation was toast and it would need a fresh install.

I even followed several guides that allow the BCD to be created manually from scratch without success using bcdedit and bootrec /rebuildbcd.

In the end the simple solution was to make the Vista partition the active partition and everything came together. Until then I using GRUB to boot between Vista and Solaris with Solaris being the active partition.

In the end with EasyBCD I didn't even need the GRUB menu.lst file. There is a NeoSmart Linux boot loader which recgonised the Solaris partition and boots GRUB without a hitch.

So in summary:

a) I had a Vista installed first that was working ok
b) Installed OpenSolaris on another partition which becomes the active partition. This also installs GRUB and you can boot between Vista and Solaris (minus hibernation for Vista)
c) Install EasyBCD and make Vista the active partition again.
d) Configure the NeoSmart Linux bootloader to be able to boot Solaris while keeping Vista as the active partition.

Sweet!