I'm trying to install Solaris/x86 on my ATAPI drive. However, the installation program says the root partition must end within the first 1023 cylinders of the disk. What can I do?

I'm trying to install Solaris/x86 on my ATAPI drive. However, the installation program says the root partition must end within the first 1023 cylinders of the disk. What can I do?

The root filesystem must be below 1024 cylinders of your disk
The number of cylinders has nothing to do with the size of the disk.
So it is possible to have 1.5GB partitions below 1024 cylinders on some
disks (with more MB per cylinder) and not on others.
Newer BIOSes support LBA, Logical Block Addressing. The BIOS may have to
be edited on bootup to enable the LBA option. This bumps the HD limit
to 8GB. With LBA, Solaris/x86 and other operating systems can be placed
anywhere you want.
For older BIOSes, the 1024 cylinder limit translates to
the first 512 MB on ATAPI.


Be sure that the root and the boot slice of the Solaris partition are
within the 1024 cylinder boundary using the BIOS geometry reported for
your disk and you should be fine. That is the cause of the "slice
extends beyond end of disk" message -- exceeding 1024 cylinders.


If you're having problems, simply make the root
filesystem smaller and create an additional /usr filesystem (and, e. g.,
/var, /opt, . . .). For reliability, the root filesystem should be small
(say 64 MB) with large filesystems mounted on it.


I have seen problems with fdisk as well. In those cases I used a disk
editor to adjust the partition so it started and ended on cylinder
boundaries. This seems to happen when Solaris uses the actual geometry of
a disk, as seen by Solaris at runtime, vs. the geometry reported by a
controller to allow DOS to think it has no more than 1024 cylinders.
Partition Magic reported problems with that partition when I tried it on
systems with Solaris partitions that weren't aligned with the other partitions
correctly.


Update:
Solaris 8 has removed this size restriction for ATAPI drives.
One must reinstall Solaris, not upgrade, to take advantage of this.
SCSI drives have never had the partition size restriction,
although the boot code in the root / filesystem had to be under the
1024 cylinder limit.


[Thanks to Ronald Kuehn and Mike Riley]



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