V.4 Two hard disks, Solaris, Windows NT - safety
Overview
There are two hard disk drives on the system, and two operating systems
installed: Solaris and Windows NT. FAT-16 partition, is used to exchange data
between systems. No third party boot manager is involved, Solaris boot manager
boots both systems.
Solaris and NT are installed safely, that is, on separate hard disks. This allows
to boot them directly by switching BIOS boot sequence.
Partitioning
Hard disks will be partitioned as follows (proportions are meaningless):
HDD-1
| 1. Primary - FAT-16 | | | |
| | 2. Primary - Solaris UFS | Solaris | | active |
|
|
|
HDD-2
| 1. Primary - NTFS | Windows NT | | active |
|
| 2. Extended |
| | | | | 2.1. NTFS |
| | | | | 2.2. NTFS |
|
|
Recipe
-
Connect hardware and configure BIOS. Set HDD-2 as the boot drive (see
IV.1 for details).
-
Install Windows NT. During setup, create a primary NTFS partition on HDD-2
for NT system. This will allow boot HDD-2 directly in case of problems (see
notes on the size). After that you should be able to
boot NT. The primary partition is C:.
-
Boot NT and use its Disk Administrator to create an extended partition and
NTFS logical volumes on HDD-2, for user data, applications, archives etc.
Assign drive letters D:, E:, etc. for all created volumes and CD-ROM(s).
-
Use NT Disk Administrator to create a primary FAT-16 partition on HDD-1.
This can be FAT-32 in case of W2K or latter NT version.
Assign a drive letter to this volume. The partition will be used to
exchange data between operating systems and to boot Windows NT. Size of
FAT-16 should not exceed 1 GB to get reasonable cluster size.
-
From root of C: copy files
ntldr,
ntdetect.com,
boot.ini,
ntbootdd.sys if HDD-1 is SCSI.
to the FAT partition on HDD-1.
-
Edit the copy of
boot.ini file in FAT partition and change all
rdisk(0) entries to rdisk(1). In case of mixed IDE/SCSI environments read
notes on booting NT.
-
Reboot the machine to BIOS setup and change BIOS boot sequence to boot from
HDD-1. Do not swap hard disk cables (see notes on hardware and BIOS
for details).
-
The FAT partition on HDD-1 is not boot-able. To fix this follow the steps of
Fixing NT boot sector section.
Now, you should be able to boot NT from FAT partition on HDD-1.
-
On the remainder of HDD-1 create Solaris partition.
-
Install Solaris. Select HDD-1 for installation. This partition becomes active and
Solaris boot manager will appear after reboot. To boot NT select 1, i.e.
FAT partition.
-
Under Solaris, create
/share directory, and add the following
line:
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0p1:c - /share pcfs - yes -
to /etc/vfstab file, in order to have FAT partition mounted
automatically at the boot time (see notes on mounting FAT partitions). If HDD-1 is an IDE drive drop t0.
If HDD-1 is SCSI and HDD-2 IDE, then the address of HDD-1 is
c1t0d0.
Remarks:
The above procedure seems complicated. It could be simplified by setting HDD-1
as the boot drive at the very beginning, creating FAT-16, and then installing
NT. This order, however, causes that FAT on HDD-1 becomes the drive C: and
there could be problems with booting NT directly from HDD-2. The advantage of
this simplified method is that DOS or Win9x can be installed on HDD-2, in
contrary to the original procedure.
NT Loader as the default boot manager
-
Reboot to BIOS setup and change boot sequence to boot from HDD-2.
-
Boot NT.
-
Use Bootpart program to add Solaris entry to the NT Loader menu.