[illumos-Discuss] multiboot-fu needed

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Wed, 2010-09-15 at 06:40 -0700, Richard Doty wrote:

> >
> > Maybe if we understood what problem you're trying to solve with multiple
> > partitions, we could help better?
> 
> I boot illumos from CD, and install is using less than the whole disk.  
> Then I boot openindiana from CD, to install it on some of the remaining 
> disk.  Woops, installer says I can only have 1 solaris partition.  (pick 
> any 2 flavors of solaris for this experiment, they all seem to have the 
> same limitation)
> 
> There have been tricks in the past to get linux+win+solaris on the same 
> disk, but I'd like to have 2 kinds of solaris.


So, you can do this.  But you have to use multiple slices within the
same partition.  Once you've given an install the whole partition,
you're kind of screwed.  You'd have to reallocate that a bit
differently.

If you plan ahead for this and use slices (which are kind of like
'partitions in a partition') intelligently, you can have many different
installs of Solaris.  I think on x86 hardware up to 16 slices are
supported on a given partition.   (On SPARC its only 8.)

	- Garrett