For all you dual-booters out there...

[Justin Erenkrantz]

Hello everyone,

After many trials and tribulations, I have finally succeeded in getting
Solaris 2.6/x86 to work with NT 4.0's boot loader!

The key is BootPart (available at: http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm). Go
to the site, d/l ver. 2.20 , extract the zip file, and run the following
command (must be logged in as an NT admin or from a DOS boot disk):

bootpart <Solaris Partition ID> c:\bootsect.sun "Solaris 2.6 / x86"

The boot.ini entry added by bootpart is:

c:\bootsect.sun="Solaris"

Pretty simple, eh?

You can obtain the correct partition ID by running bootpart with no
arguments. BootPart will then display all of the partitions on your system
and their file type. The Solaris partition should be denoted with an
asterisk (*) and will be a Linux Swap partition. For instance, my Solaris
partition ID was 22 (yeah, i got 25+ partitions - does anyone else have
anything close?). The c:\bootsect.sun is the new boot sector that will load
that specified partition from NT boot loader. Not exactly sure what would
happen from an NTFS drive. Same thought applies though.

For all of you Partition Magic fans out there, it's Boot Manager DOES do the
job. But, I kinda like the idea of one and only one boot manager
controlling my system. ;-) If you don't have Partition Magic and are lucky
enough to have a BIOS that can switch startup disks (as mine does), you can
manually switch over to the Solaris hard disk. This is a temporary kludge.
An even worse kludge is a Solaris boot disk. That is only a last resort....

I think I have pretty much deciphered the boot process for Solaris and NT.
If you would like an explanation of why this process works or have any other
questions that I might be able to help out with (like this procedure doesn't
work!), e-mail me and I'll see if I can give you a coherent answer. BTW,
I'm an NT admin and started playing around with Solaris, so I don't know
that much about Solaris. DiskProbe in the NT Resource Kit is a GREAT
utility for this type of stuff.

It's getting late and I haven't had any caffeine or sleep in a while...

Later,
Justin Erenkrantz
jus...@erenkrantz.com

[Greg Kellogg]

OK, cool I just figured it out... Partition magic is the hard way, an
easier way is to use Sytem Commander, why? Becase the Boot manager resides
in the MBR which allows you to continue to have Solaris "active", hence, no
more problems!

Greg

Justin Erenkrantz wrote in message <6u28as$c...@bgtnsc03.worldnet.att.net>...

[Justin Erenkrantz]

System Commander and PM's Boot Manager use the same technique. Although,
System Commander has a nice interface. Hehe...

This procedure lets you get rid of any other boot loader that you don't
want. =)

Later,
Justin

Greg Kellogg wrote in message <6u4lpq$b...@bgtnsc02.worldnet.att.net>...