Alan Perry's Blog

Wednesday February 21, 2007

Setting up a Mac Mini for dual booting Solaris and MacOS X

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I have been working with Solaris on an Apple Mac Mini. Once you get Solaris installed, it works pretty well, but, in my experience, getting Solaris installed (or, more specifically, getting the disk set-up before the install) was fairly awkward.

Before I get too far into this, I would like to point out that I am not an expert in almost any of the topics involved here. I read up on a lot of new topics as I encountered problems. I spent a lot of time on trial and error experiments, trying to determine which steps I could leave out. I would get Solaris installed, then scrub the hard disk and try it again. Unfortunately, each iteration took around 3-4 hours.

What I am saying is there could be a better way to do all of this.

So, what do you need? Obviously, you need a Mac Mini. I am using the current 1.66MHz Intel Core Duo base model. You also need an external hard disk with MacOS X installed because you are going to be booting up in MacOS a few times. Since you will be messing with the MBR on the internal disk, I wouldn't bet on being able to boot MacOS from it. You need a Solaris Express installation DVD, preferably a recent build.

1. Install MacOS on the internal HD. If MacOS is not already installed and you have to reformat the drive, make sure to zero out the drive (a formatting option with the MacOS Disk Utility). Some of the later steps may interpret whatever happens to be on the disk as valid data and complicate things.

2. Make sure that your Mac Mini has the latest firmware installed and then install Apple's Boot Camp application. You can get it from the Apple Web Site.

3. Run Boot Camp Assistant. This will set up your Mac Mini so that it can boot Windows (and other operating systems like Solaris), allow you to repartition the internal hard disk with a "Windows" partition and start "Windows" installation. The "Windows" partition is where you will install Solaris. I repartition what will be the Solaris partition to 32G. Before hitting the button to "Start Installation", be sure that the Solaris install DVD has been inserted in the drive and recognized by MacOS. After hitting the button, the Mac will reboot from the DVD drive.

4. Boot into Solaris from the installation DVD. At this point, prtvtoc(1m) and format(1m) both report the contents of the MBR as the VTOC. Exit from Solaris installation and confirm this for yourself.

5. Boot into MacOS from the external hard disk. Unmount the internal hard disk. Change the Win32 MBR partition into a Solaris2 MBR partition using fdisk. It should be the third entry, but look for the one with partition type 0B, labelled Win95 FAT-32, to be safe. Edit the entry to change the partition type to BF (Solaris2). fdisk does not recognize the type and labels it as <unknown ID>.

6. Boot into Solaris from the installation DVD. Attempt to install Solaris. It should fail when it tries to partition and label the internal hard disk. However, somewhere during the process enough information is written to allow you to proceed. Without this step, prtvtoc continues to report the MBR info as the VTOC. With this step, if you reboot into Solaris, you can see that prtvtoc acts as if the EFI partition on the internal hard disk is the Solaris partition.

7. Boot into MacOS from the external hard disk and then unmount the internal hard disk. Using fdisk, change type of the EFI partition to something that Solaris doesn't understand (such as AF (HFS+)).

8. Boot into Solaris from the installation DVD. Exit from Solaris installation and run format from a terminal shell. Use format's type command to enter the geometry info for the Solaris partition. After that, you need to reboot for some reason in order for the geometry info to stick.

9. Reboot into Solaris from the installation DVD. You should be able to run through Solaris installation. Just to be safe, before running installation, I set up the VTOC using fmthard(1M).

And it is all that simple.

When you reboot, if you hold down the option key as the Mac Mini comes back up, you will be presented with a couple of disk icons, one labelled Mac OS and the other labelled Windows. The Windows one is actually Solaris.

That's it. Have fun.

( Feb 21 2007, 08:16:20 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]