Multi-booting Solaris and other operating systems

V.1 Single hard disk, Solaris, Windows NT

Overview

In this example there is a single one hard disk on the system. It might be either IDE or SCSI. Two operating systems are installed: Solaris and Windows NT. FAT-16 volume is created to provide data exchange between them. After the installation is complete, at the boot time a user is presented the Solaris boot manager menu to select which operating system to load.

Partitioning

The hard disk will be partitioned as follows (proportions are meaningless):

1. Primary - NTFS
Windows NT


2. Primary - Solaris UFS
Solaris
active

3. Extended

		3.1. FAT-16

		3.2. NTFS

		3.3. NTFS

Recipe

Connect hardware and configure BIOS (see IV.1 for details).
Install Windows NT. Create one primary partition with NTFS as a file system (see notes on the size). This will be C: drive.
Create Solaris partition. Be careful not to remove existing NT partition.
Install Solaris. Solaris boot partition becomes the active one. Solaris boot manager becomes the default, and despite Solaris does not recognize NTFS file system NT may be booted from its menu.
With NT Disk Administrator create an extended partition and logical volumes. Create at least one FAT-16 file system to enable communication between Solaris and NT. In case of Solaris 7 or earlier, FAT-16 file system must end before 1024-th cylinder to be accessible by Solaris. Additional NTFS volumes help in organizing NT user data and applications. They become D:, E: and so on.
Under Solaris, create /share directory, and add the following line to /etc/vfstab file under Solaris:
```
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0p3:c	-	/share	pcfs	-	yes	-
```
FAT-16 partition will be mounted automatically at the boot time (see notes on mounting FAT partitions). If the hard disk is IDE drop t0.

Remarks: It is also possible to setup Solaris before Windows NT. If that is the case, to boot Solaris either, activate Solaris boot manager, or install some third party boot manager. To activate Solaris boot manager make the Solaris partition active. Use DOS fdisk program on DOS boot floppy, or NT Disk Administrator.

NT Loader as the default boot manager

To make NT Loader the default boot manager that is able to boot Solaris some trick must be applied. The following programs on a DOS boot floppy disk will be necessary:

boot.exe,
[OS-BS 1.35] or [OS-BS 2.0 beta] setup program, that is os-bs.com or osbs20b8.com, respectively.

When the system is setup according to the description in the previous section, perform the following steps:

Boot system into DOS with DOS boot floppy.
Create an image file of the MBR. Issue the following command at the DOS prompt:

boot /r /drive:0 mbr solaris.bin
Setup OS-BS boot manager. Run program os-bs.com (or osbs20b8.com), set NT as the only operating system, give it whatever label you like, set timeout to 1 second. Leave Solaris partition active and order OS-BS boot manager not to change it.
Restart the system and boot Windows NT.
Copy the file solaris.bin from the floppy disk to the root of the NT boot partition.

Edit boot.ini file so that it contains the following entries:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
 
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="MS Windows NT 4.0"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="MS Windows NT 4.0 [VGA mode]" /basevideo /sos
C:\solaris.bin="Sun Solaris"

After the system is rebooted the NT Loader menu should appear. Now, it contains an entry to boot Solaris. When Solaris is selected its own boot manager appears.