RE: Booting solaris from linux on a dual-boot machine with linux GRUBMBR : a difficult question

[Treutwein Bernhard]

Hi Ian,

just a try: I extracted the MBR from a pure Solaris Grub-machine
and attached it. It is extracted with 

        dd if=/dev/dsk/c0d0p0 of=MBR.bin bs=446 count=1

Put it somewhere, where Fedora's grub can find it and
try a 

        chainloader (hd?,?)/.../MBR.bin
        boot

from Fedora-grub command line. It might work.

Other possibility: 

Under Solaris Apparently /boot/grub/bin/grub is the grub shell.
So you could try to reinstall with that. After getting access
to the ufs partition from linux (which is possible see:
http://www.lrz.de/~bernhard/grub-solaris.html last paragraph).

Hope that helps ...

PS:
> UFS. The solaris grub includes patches to support UFS, but 
> these patches were not sent upstream and are not part of the 
> official GRUB.

yes that is a pity, but currently the grub project
refuses to accept development for grub 0.9x although
I think the Solaris stuff should be included ...

I don't know about the status for grub2, but it would be
important that solaris ufs support makes it way into it.
(Shudong Zhou & Jongki Suwandi are you listening?)
--
        Bernhard Treutwein, IuK, Ref. III A 3
        Bernhard.Treutwein(at)verwaltung uni-muenchen de

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Brown [mailto:address@hidden 
> Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2006 3:37 PM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Booting solaris from linux on a dual-boot machine 
> with linux GRUBMBR : a difficult question
> 
> 
> Hello,
> This may seem be a somewhat difficult (at least to me ) and 
> long question; Hope you can help.
> 
> I have Feodra Core 6 on x86_64.
>  The grub there is from default installation rpm ,grub-0.97-13.
> 
> I had installed linux AFTER I hade installed solaris on this 
> machine. Now I want to be able to boot solaris from it.
> 
> I boot my disk from linux.
> 
> fdisk -l shows:
> 
>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/sda1               1        3824    30716248+   c  W95 
> FAT32 (LBA)
> /dev/sda2            3825        3837      104422+  83  Linux
> /dev/sda3            3838       10211    51199155   83  Linux
> /dev/sda4   *       10212       15312    40973782+  bf  Solaris
> 
> 
> Now, as you can see, /dev/sda4 is the solaris partition ; it 
> is also the boot partition.
> 
> It also has a GRUB installed on it,
> which was installed when the operating system was installed.
> I assume the linux installation did not destroy it
> (BTW,I used the Fedora Core default GRUB installation,
> so the linux GRUB was installed in the MBR).
> 
> When I run:
> file -s /dev/sda4
> I get:
> /dev/sda4: x86 boot sector, GRand Unified Bootloader (0.94); 
> partition 1: ID=0xc, starthead 1, startsector 63, 61432497 
> sectors; partition 2: ID=0x83, starthead 254, startsector 
> 61432560, 208845 sectors; partition 3: ID=0x83, starthead 
> 254, startsector 61641405, 102398310 sectors; partition 4: 
> ID=0xbf, active, starthead 254, startsector 164039715, 
> 81947565 sectors, code offset 0x48
> 
> when I run: dmesg |grep solaris , I get:
> sda4: <solaris: [s0] sda5 [s1] sda6 [s2] sda7 [s3] sda8 [s5] 
> sda9 [s7] sda10 >
> 
> 
> I tried mounting the solaris partitions from linux , 
> /dev/sda5-sda/sda10,
> by: mount -t ufs -o ro /dev/sda[1-5] /mnt/solaris[1-5]
> but I get error (mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on
> /dev/sda5,...)
> ; (this was done after ufs was modprobed succesfully, 
> needless to say).  However, this seems a BUG in Fedora Core 
> on x86_64, bacause with Feodora Core 6 Live-CD I am ***ABLE** 
> to mount these UFS solaris partitions and navigate to my 
> files there, etc. I aslo can boot from solaris USB livecd and 
> view the solaris partitions; so I am sure that nothing there 
> in the solaris partitions/slices themselves is damaged.
> 
> By the way, at a different machine in the lab we did install 
> first linux and than solaris , and we could boot solaris from 
> linux and linux from solaris (we could also mount each one 
> from the other , but only as read-write).
> 
> Now , my question is : As I know, linux grub does not support 
> UFS. The solaris grub includes patches to support UFS, but 
> these patches were not sent upstream and are not part of the 
> official GRUB.
>   Upon boot the GRUB of linux is started (it is in the MBR).
> I want that it will be able to boot solaris.
> what is the solution for this ? Is it possible at all ?
> I though of chainloading , so that linux GRUB will
> start solaris GRUB , and I made
> some trial of chainloading but it did not work; maybe I am 
> missing something ? More specifically, one trial that I did 
> and seems logical (or maybe not ? I'm not sure) was:
> >From the grub menu, is this:
> rootnoverify(hd0,3)
> makeactive
> chainloader +1
> 
> And I got:
>   Invalid or unsupprted executable format.
> 
> Any idea what I should do?
> 
> Regards,
> Ian
> 
> 
> 
>

MBR.bin
Description: MBR.bin