How can I boot both Solaris/x86 and Win NT on the same disk?
Here's one way of doing it. Solaris/x86 requires it's partition tobe active and uses it's own boot manager with it hard-coded to
boot to Solaris on timeouts. If you want to use NT's boot manager
or default to another operating system, it usually requires installing
both operating systems on separate disks or using a third-party product,
such as System Commander, that makes the partition "Active" on the fly
This solution, described here by Andrew Mickish, is to make a boot floppy:
Although the Solaris x86 installation manual makes it sound like all you
have to do is partition your disks to get multiple operating systems to
work, I found that this was not the case. To get a dual boot of Solaris and
NT on the same hard drive, without using the Solaris default boot manager,
you have to use a floppy boot disk to help start one of the OSes. Here is
how I got NT and Solaris working on the same disk.
The following fdisk partitioning causes Solaris to boot from the hard drive,
yet allows you to boot to NT if you insert a floppy disk with the NT boot
loader:
+--------------------------------------------------+
| Solaris [Active, for Solaris] |
| C: PRI-DOS (FAT) [Active, for NT] |
| D: EXT-DOS (FAT) |
+--------------------------------------------------+
Partitioning:
The Solaris partition should be created during the Solaris installation, using
Solaris's FDISK. The remaining partitions should be created during
installation of NT.
Active partition:
You must set the Solaris partition to be ACTIVE in order to make it boot to
Solaris. NT does not have to be active to boot. Use a DOS boot disk with
FDISK to quickly change which partition is active.
Boot disk:
After setting the NT partition to be active, you still need the NT boot loader
on a floppy disk in order to direct the PC to the second partition. (Usually
the boot loader is on the primary partition of the hard drive, but that
partition is Solaris and unreadable to NT.) Your floppy directs the boot
process to the right partition by using a BOOT.INI file that says where the NT
kernel can be found:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00 [VGA mode]" /basevideo /sos
Note: The numbering of partitions is one-based, so the C: partition in the
diagram above is in partition #2.
Please send comments and suggestions to
mickish@cmu.edu
[Thanks to Andrew Mickish]
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