[CentOS] Dual booting centos 4.1 and Solaris 10 express build 15

Aleksandar Milivojevic alex at milivojevic.org
Thu Jul 7 04:19:30 UTC 2005


mohamed yusuf wrote:
> I have been trying to multiboot centos 4.1 and the
> current solaris express build 15. I have two hard
> drive s, the first one ( hd0 ) devoted to CentOS 4.1
> and windows xp (no problems). The second drive (hd1)
> for Solaris 10 only. I tried to boot solaris from
> CentOS grub and got the following error messages:
> 
> Booting Solaris 10 
> root(hd1,0)
> Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0Xbf
> kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot
> Error 17: can not mount  selected partition
> press any key to continue....

Grub knows how to read BSD UFS type of file system, but I'm not sure 
about Solaris file system.  Solaris UFS is basically BSD UFS with some 
extra stuff.  You said you were able to boot it before.  Some of the 
reasons for failure could be:

  - wrong partition type
  - logging enabled on Solaris UFS
  - different version of Solaris UFS
  - Solaris kernel stored outside of BIOS addressable disk area

Also, I'm not sure if you want to have makeactive and chainloader 
options if Grub is loading kernel directly.

One thing to check is how disk is organized.  I remember that Solaris 
likes to have an partition for itself, install Solaris disklabel onto 
it, and then sub-partition it into 8 partitions (so basically you get 
partitions inside partitions, something like extended partition in 
DOS/Windows).  Somehow I doubt Grub would be able to read that.

If you simply can't make Grub to mount Solaris partition, and load the 
kernel, your best bet would be installing Solaris boot loader onto first 
partition of second disk, and using similar configuration as for booting 
Windows XP.  Something along the lines:

title Solaris 10
    rootnoverify (hd1,0)
    chainloader +1



More information about the CentOS mailing list