Description of Problem: I had an ide disk on hda with Solaris 8 installed (two partitions: 'bc" and '83'). I then attempted to install beta1 with the intent to delete these partitions and allocate new partitions. The installer partitioning refused to deal with this disk. I got around the problem by booting a rescue system and creating an empty DOS partition table. How Reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. as above. 2. 3. Actual Results: Expected Results: Additional Information:
Could you attach the fdisk output of the original drive state?
Created attachment 22887 [details] fdisk output -- partitioning create by Solaris 8 install
Some additional information -- when partioning options panel is up the following message appears on a popup at the top of the screen: "Unable to align partition properly. This probably means that another partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table because it didn't ha ..." This message is in a single line which goes off the right of the screen. After putting this up, the install goes into a hard lockup.
Thanks we'll look at this.
Oops. I had the opportunity to try this again and it is not quite what I previously thought. 1. The system does not lock up. I can switch between the virtual terminates. On vt1 is the full (very long) message. 2. Switch back to the gui, I kept hitting tab until I finally got out -- the popup was still at the top of the screen. 3. I proceeded to configure for an install into hdb6. 4. When it got to the install part, things seemed to just hang ... no additional messages anywhere but no install either. 5. I wiped hda and tried to install there ... works.
Just hanges? Very strange indeed. I'll try to find a copy of Solaris 8 here - I think we had one.
Solaris 2.6 just created a single "82" partition and you could share the harddisk with other systems (tricky with linux but it could be done). Solaris 8 (and maybe 7 but I don't know) allocates two partitions: the big "82" partition which it sub partitions for itself and a small (10240 bytes) partition with a strange partition id ("bc" if I remember correctly since I cannot access this as I am writing this). The Linux installer also complains about the partition definitions not being aligned correctly.
This defect considered SHOULD-FIX for Fairfax gold-release.
Out of curiosity since we've done a bit of work here since beta1... does this do any better under beta3?
Comment -- unfortunately, it is not much better under beta3. However, it is easier to live with because the message popup is readable. The problem is that Solaris really screws up the partition table. Maybe this is just one of those -- live with it. I plan to look into this a bit further but I am leaning toward saying that have Linux play with the disk first (no extended partitions) and make sure to leave one or two partitions free and then have Solaris do its stuff with the partition. I would also suggest that allocation start with Cyl 2 or 3 since Solaris plays with the beginning of the disk.
Dual booting with Solaris isn't a supportable option right now.