Stacey Marshall's Weblog: Stac, Stace, ace - blog space

The CD download was so fast I have not looked at anything else in Richard Friedman's Resources for Running Solaris OS on a Laptop.

Having burnt the System Rescue CD and restarting windows (he he, little does it know); I stopped the Acer from booting and entered the BIOS setup by pressing F2. in the BIOS I used the cursor keys to skip along the top tabs to enter the boot screen. Where I then used the up and down cursor to select (highlight) the CD/DVD ROM and pressed F6 a number of times to make it the primary selection. Saved the selection with F10 and Acer started to boot from the CD image...

In next to no time, after selecting a UK keyboard from a list, I was presented with a root shell prompt above which was some useful information including this extract:

X.Org : You can use the graphical environment.  Type startx.
the graphical environment configuration is done automatically.
X.Org comes with Window-Maker and you can use several graphical tools:
- Partition manager:..gparted
- Web browsers:.......firefox-2.0 and dillo
- Text editors:.......gvim and leafpad

Note well that this version lists gparted and not QtParted. Without further-a-do I entered _startx_ and entered a big dark room! That is to say the screen went black. I gave it a short while and then held down the power key to reset everything (I tried control-c first to no effect).

At the next attempt I took the default keyboard (experience taught me to try defaults) but to no avail. I did see some warning messages fly up the screen but alas I could not make them out. I considered using a video camera to try and catch them but first I thought I would try parted (my assumption being that it may be a non graphical version).

(parted) print
Disk /dev/hda: 100GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition table: msdos

Number	Start		End		Size		Type		File System	Flags
1			32.3kB	3150MB	3150MB	primary	fat32
2			3150MB	51.4GB	48.2GB	primary	fat32			boot, lba
3			51.4GB	100GB		48.6GB	extended					lba
5			51.4GB	100GB		48.6GB	logical	fat32

(parted) resize 2 3150MB 20GB
(parted) rm 3
(parted) print
Disk /dev/hda: 100GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition table: msdos

Number	Start		End		Size		Type		File System	Flags
1			32.3kB	3150MB	3150MB	primary	fat32
2			3150MB	20.0GB	16.9GB	primary	fat32			boot, lba

So far so good... But then I got cocky! The 'help' showed a command named 'mklabel' and 'help mklabel' showed "mklabel LABEL-TYPE : create a new disk label (partition tabel)" and "sun" was listed as a valid type. So I entered 'mklabel sun'. The net result was that my working msdos label was over-written with a new blank partition table! Thankfully there is also a rescue command so I entered 'mklabel msdos' and then used 'rescue' to recover (at least that is what I thought) my previous partitions using the information above.

But how then should I proceed now? It occurs to me that I don't really know what Solaris is expecting or indeed wants from the partition table. I assume that Solaris will allow me to create logical partitions within a partition that I create for it... I really want to ring-a-friend but then that isn't in my rules of engagement so I'm just going to assume thats the case. But before I do anything else I'm going to boot windows to make sure its still happy:

(parted) quit
root % reboot
...
F2 (and reconfigure BIOS to boot from disk)
F10 (save config)
...

Nada, nothing, nil, except back-light blackness....

OK, so I'll have to start again... I rebooted with the System Rescue CD and setup the partition thus:

(parted) mkpartfs primary fat32 32.3kb 40GB
(parted) mkpart primary sun-ufs 40GB 100%
(parted) print
Disk /dev/hda: 100GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition table: msdos

Number	Start		End		Size		Type		File System	Flags
1			32.3kB	40.0GB	40GB		primary	fat32			boot, lba
2			40.0GB	100GB		60GB		primary
(parted) quit
root % reboot

And I insert the Acer recovery DVD! Well, I thought I'd give that a go. The laptop booted a windows shell and the Acer recovery DVD asked for confirmation to restore the factory settings which I opted for. Alas the system failed to come back. I booted from another Windows XP DVD that I own into the recovery console and used diskpart, chkdsk, fixboot, fixmbr and exit... Ejected the DVD and Windows started its virgin voyage (it booted) Phew! Looking back I wonder if the rescue attempt before would have worked if I have tried fixmbr on that (as I believe that is what the problem was).

Next, I insert the Solaris DVD and reboot....

Stace