Dual boot Solaris 10/08 and Windows vista

I installed this latest Solaris 10 release on my laptop, co-exist with Windows Vista. The process is not as straight forward as it is when installing on a WinXP machine. Here you go.

The first thing I did was to resize the hard disk and create a new partition in Vista to make room for Solaris. I'm pretty sure that unallocated disk space should work fine, though I actually created NTFS on the new partition. Now we can start.

NOTE: Before start, make sure you have followings at hand:

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2. Vista rescue DVD. This might be the one you use to install Vista, or you create by yourself(create it if you have not).
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4. Gparted live CD/USB, you will find you need this Linux tool to save your Vista.
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Steps:

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• Install the Solaris 10 10/08 with the DVD. Choose option 3 or 4 to install ZFS root file system. If you try this on a machine with 1GB RAM, you will get complaints about the insufficient memory(that happened to me at least). BTW, 1GB memory is not enough too for a VirtualBox installation. What I'm talking is all about ZFS root fs. You can still make a UFS installation with 1GB RAM.
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• Reboot, here comes the fun part, you will find your Vista can not boot up when you choose the windows option in the grub menu.
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• In Solaris, install GRUB on the MBR:
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  • # installgrub -m /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2
/dev/rdsk/c0d0t0s0 NOTE: use your own raw device name for your root fs here!

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• Boot the machine with GParted live CD/USB. You will find a NTFS partition and an unknown partition, yes, that's the partition where the ZFS resides.
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• Move the boot flag from the unknown partition to the NTFS partition.
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  • GParted does not support ZFS is because of the license incompatibility. ZFS is released under CDDL. GPL does not allow Linux kernel linking with code under a set of licenses, including CDDL. This is not a problem for our case here, just move the flag.
    
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• Boot the machine with the Vista rescue disk. After a while when the system tries to load the installed vista, it will complain something like "…startup is wrong, fix?", simply accept "yes, and reboot".
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The machine is still booted by the GRUB loader, if you want to use the vista loader, then you need some extra steps to edit the bcd registry. Here's a very good blog post with details. It also helps me to get my vista back .

Enjoy it. Maybe you want to try a triple boot with OpenSolaris, good luck then.

Note: This artical was originally posted at http://blogs.sun.com/sjie/entry/dual_boot_solaris_10_08