<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="SGML-Tools 1.0.9"> <TITLE>Linux+Solaris HOWTO: Preparing your Hard Drive</TITLE> <LINK HREF="Linux+Solaris-3.html" REL=next> <LINK HREF="Linux+Solaris-1.html" REL=previous> <LINK HREF="Linux+Solaris.html#toc2" REL=contents> </HEAD> <BODY> <A HREF="Linux+Solaris-3.html">Next</A> <A HREF="Linux+Solaris-1.html">Previous</A> <A HREF="Linux+Solaris.html#toc2">Contents</A> <HR> <H2><A NAME="harddrive"></A> <A NAME="s2">2. Preparing your Hard Drive</A></H2> <P>To Prepare your hard-drive for Solaris, you need to know about standard PC partition tables and about Solaris disk slices. In this HOWTO I talk about single-disk systems only, but all the information should also apply to a multi-disk environment. <H2><A NAME="ss2.1">2.1 Traditional PC partitions</A> </H2> <P>The standard partition-table has only 4 entries. The entries important for us are the following: <DL> <DT><B>A Primary Partition</B><DD><P>Takes up one entry, and contains exactly one partition. A waste of resources, but the only partition you can boot from! <DT><B>An extended Partition</B><DD><P>Takes up one entry, but can contain multiple DOS, Linux, and other partitions <DT><B>A Solaris Partition</B><DD><P>Takes up one entry, but can contain multiple Solaris Partitions </DL> To find out what partitions are present on your system, use the <CODE>fdisk</CODE> program. Partitions numbers 1 to 4 (<CODE>hda1</CODE>..<CODE>4</CODE>, <CODE>sda1</CODE>..<CODE>4</CODE>, ...) are the ones in your partition table. <H2><A NAME="ss2.2">2.2 Solaris partition labels</A> </H2> <P>Solaris has its own partitioning scheme. It uses one entry in the partition table, and this entry is and acts as this partition would be the entire disk. <P>This virtual disk is then divided in up to 8 slices. The third slice, s2, covers the whole virtual disk, so you actually have up to 7 slices for Solaris. <P>Unfortunately, the Solaris partition entry has the same type as a Linux Swap partition (82). Therefore, you should not have any Linux swap partitions as primary partitions. Linux doesn't care about this, but who knows what Solaris does? <P>Although the Linux fdisk program has some ``Sun disklabel'' support, this doesn't seem to help any. <H2><A NAME="ss2.3">2.3 Hard disk space</A> </H2> <P> Of course, Solaris needs disk space. The minimum installation of Solaris 8 is about 300 MB. For the normal tools its about 700 MB, and for a ``developer-system'' about 1 GB. <P>But this is only the space required for the base installation. You might want to add a lot of GNU-Tools, and other stuff. And if you want to share data between Solaris and Linux, this has to happen on the Solaris partitions. <P>You might even think of sharing your home directories between Solaris and Linux. As the time of this writing: Forget it! I messed up my home directory doing so and I was <EM>very</EM> happy about my backup. See also section <A HREF="Linux+Solaris-6.html#sharing">sharing data</A><H2><A NAME="ss2.4">2.4 Quick check list</A> </H2> <P>Here's the quick check list. Make sure you: <UL> <LI>have used no more than 3 entries in your partition table</LI> <LI>have no Linux swap partitions as primary partitions</LI> <LI>Have at least 1 Linux ext2 partition as primary</LI> <LI>Have at least 1 GB unpartitioned space</LI> </UL> <HR> <A HREF="Linux+Solaris-3.html">Next</A> <A HREF="Linux+Solaris-1.html">Previous</A> <A HREF="Linux+Solaris.html#toc2">Contents</A> </BODY> </HTML>