Hi Alvin,
Though I'm not sure what component this lives in (if it's
installer or an fdisk/library issue) however, feel free to submit bugs at
http://defects.opensolaris.org. I've filed this there as bug# 7651
(http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=7651).
Thank you,
Clay
On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Alvin Goats wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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