Multi-booting Solaris and other operating systems

V.3 Single hard disk, Solaris, Linux, Windows NT, Windows 98

Overview

There is only one hard disk drive on the system. Four operating systems are installed: Solaris, Linux, Windows NT and Windows 98. FAT volume on the extended partition enables communication between all operating systems. The default boot manager is Solaris one. Windows 98 is selected to boot in the NT Loader menu.

Partitioning

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

1. Primary - FAT-16
Windows 98


2. Primary - Solaris UFS
Solaris
active

3. Primary - Linux ext2fs
Linux


4. Extended

		4.1. FAT-32

		4.2. Linux swap

		4.3. Linux ext2fs

		4.4. NTFS Windows NT

		4.5. NTFS

		4.6. NTFS

Recipe

Connect hardware and configure BIOS (see IV.1 for details).
Install Windows 98. Create one primary FAT-16 partition for Windows 98 system only (see notes on the size). This could be FAT-32 in case of W2K.
Create Solaris primary partition with Ranish PM.
Install Solaris. Solaris boot manager is now the default one. It lets boot Solaris and Windows.
Install Linux. Remember that the type of Linux swap volume, is 0x82, the same as already existing Solaris partition. With Linux fdisk create one primary partition of type ext2fs 0x83 for /, /boot and other system file systems, an extended partition, one FAT logical volume at the beginning of the extended partition, one logical volume for swap of type 0x82 and one logical volume of type ext2fs 0x83 for /home file system (read notes on Linux installation in V.2).
Install Lilo into /dev/sda3 - Linux primary partition. At this point, Linux partition is marked active and only Linux may be booted.
Under Linux, with its fdisk utility, mark Solaris partition as active. This will make Solaris boot manager the default one, which allows to boot other systems.
Install Windows NT. NT setup program detects FAT-16 partition and Windows 98 installation. Windows 98 can be selected to boot in the NT Loader menu. Create a NTFS logical volume on the extended partition to install NT system into.
With NT Disk Administrator create NTFS volumes D:, E: for user data and applications.
Use NT Disk Administrator to set Solaris partition to active.
If necessary create one or more FAT-32 volumes for Windows 98. Keep in mind that only the first FAT volume within the extended partition can be mounted under Solaris.
Under Linux, create /share directory, and add the following line to /etc/fstab file:
```
/dev/sda5	/share	vfat	user,rw,exec	0	0
```
This will make (4.1) FAT-32 partition automatically mounted at the boot time.
Under Solaris, create /share directory, and add the following line to /etc/vfstab file:
```
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0p4:c	-	/share	pcfs	-	yes	-
```
(4.1) FAT-32 partition will be mounted automatically at the boot time (see notes on mounting FAT partitions).

Remarks: If the hard disk is IDE use hda instead of sda and drop t0.

LILO as the default boot manager

Boot Linux.

Edit /etc/lilo.conf, as in the example:

boot=/dev/sda 
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
compact
prompt
timeout=50
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.0.39
	label=linux
	root=/dev/sda3
	read-only
other=/dev/sda1
	label=nt
other=/dev/sda2
	label=solaris

Run as root /sbin/lilo to apply changes (see notes on LILO configuration).

Next time you will boot the system LILO should show up at the start of boot up. Windows 98 can be loaded by selecting NT in LILO prompt and then Windows 98 in the NT Loader menu.