Hi, I noted an issue last year about installing OpenSolaris on a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop and had no resolution to the issue, even with the help of Sun's staff.
I have continued to plug away at installing OpenSolaris and have come across what the issue really is. The Dell Inspiron 1000 orignally shipped with a 40G HD, I upgraded to a 160G HD so I could multiboot OS's of my choice and had WindowsXP, Slackware 12.0 and Kubuntu 8.04.1 installed on it. The 2007 version of Belenix was able to correctly find a 160G HD on the laptop, but had issues with grub booting. All of the 2008 versions would report 128G only. It was not until I got a 250G HD to install that I was able to find that a virgin drive would also report as a 128G drive while Linux and Windows reported a 250G drive. The problem is in the limitations of the BIOS. My Dell BIOS can only show up to 137G, is not capable of showing anything larger. Windows and Linux are probing the drive itself, bypassing the BIOS and therefore finding a 160G or 250G HD as loaded. OpenSolaris is probing the BIOS and reporting the wrong drive size and requesting that I remove all other partitions that exceed the 128G limit which OpenSolaris does see. I've been able to install OpenSolaris by keeping the partition for it below the 128G line and removing all other higher partitions during the install. This is not very pleasant, but manageable. While this was a limit on my laptop, others with similar BIOS issues will have the same poor experience at installing and using OpenSolaris if this is not fixed. Please look at probing the hard drive directly and bypassing the BIOS. This was done in Linux and I have run huge drives on older machines that were not able to show anything above some BIOS or drive controller boot ROM limit (starting with the 32G limit long ago). Successful 250G set up is: Partition 1: 40G for MS-Windows XP Partition 2: 40G for Slackware 12.0 Partition 3: 40G for OpenSolaris Partition 4: extended partiton Partition 5: 5G for Linux Swap Partition 6: 40G for Kubuntu Linux 8.04.1 Partition 7: Linux share partiton, about 85G Alvin Goats
