Solaris

I can't get dual boot to work. I have first installed Windows10 on a new SSD, and then I installed Solaris 11.3 on the same disk. When I boot the disk, the GRUB shows Solaris, but no Windows. I can boot into Solaris fine. When I try to boot from a Windows10 partition, it does not work. Windows says the installation is faulty and I need to repair the installation. When I try different repair options, it doesnt work. Sometimes it reboots. Should I modify GRUB or what? I cant get Windows to work.

So, what are the steps to dual boot Win10 and Solaris 11.3? Anyone knows?


I have a Supermicro X10SAT motherboard, with UEFI.

SOLVED.

BUT BEWARE, SEE COMMENT BELOW!!!

It was quite easy to dual boot Windows 10 and Solaris 11.3 (when you know what to do). These are the steps:
1) Install Solaris 11.3 first.
2) Install Windows 10. It seems that "fast boot" option can cause problems when dual booting, because "fast boot" changes the UEFI boot options, so when you dual boot the UEFI, choices might not be correct because Win10 edits the current UEFI boot option. So I turned off "fast boot" option in Windows 10 just to be safe.
3) Choose which OS to boot via "boot menu" when you startup the pc.
Do not install Solaris first, because then Windows installation will break and not boot up "Windows needs repair, insert repair disk, etc etc". Install Win10 first.

WARNING!!! BEWARE: Windows 10 will overwrite other disks if they contain other filesystems than NTFS. This happened:

1) I created a Win10 install USB and checked it could really boot up. I booted the Win10 install USB and browsed the different disks in my system, and then I exited without saving anything or doing any changes. I just browsed my disks and examined some options Win10 offered, no changes. And when I rebooted into Solaris 11.3, the system disk was dead. Win10 install program had somehow overwritten my boot sector in the Solaris system disk. Solaris was unbootable. Just by starting up the Windows 10 software, it started to change my system disk.

So, do not boot up the Windows 10 software if you have non Windows OS - because it is likely Windows will overwrite the boot sectors.

2) Because my Solaris system disk was unbootable now, by the Windows 10 install software, I inserted a new SSD disk and installed Windows 10 on the new disk. I partitioned the SSD disk so I could start with installing Win10, and then I wanted to install Solaris 11.3 - but this was wrong as it caused problems. The correct way is to install Solaris first. I did not know this, so I installed Windows 10 first. So I had a new unallocated SSD, and created a Win10 partition and started the Win10 installation. It turned out that Windows 10 install software, OVERWRITES other disks in the system as a scratch area. I had my large 4TB zfs disk full with data, and Win10 install software partitioned my zfs disk into two parts, and formatted the first part and copied some Windows files to it. My 4TB zfs disk is gone, because Windows 10 has used it as a scratch area.

So, when you install Windows 10, remove ALL OTHER DISKS in the system, or chances are that Windows 10 will overwrite them with garbage as Windows mistakes ZFS and other filesystems as raw disks.

If you have the memory, wouldn't it be better to create a Solaris VM. Then you can use Windows and Solaris at the same time. For that matter why learn Solaris, when so many companies are using Linux... I supported Oracle databases on Solaris in the past, and it just seems that there is significantly more development in Linux than Solaris.

Running Solaris 11.3 on bare metal allows running kernel zones, a great new feature introduced with 11.2. When Solaris is virtualized, at least on VirtualBox, you cannot experience with kernel zones.

The general rule of thumb for Windows and any other operating system sharing the same disk is to install Windows first. This is because most versions of Windows OSes assume that all devices and all disk space belong to the Windows OS.

Once Windows is installed and functional, you can then free up disk space to create additional partitions and install a non-Windows OS such as Solaris or Linux.

I do the other way around: I run Solaris bare metal, and then virtualize Windows via VirtualBox. The reason is that Solaris is more stable than Windows, so it makes more sense to run Solaris bare metal. Another reason I run Solaris bare metal, is because I use ZFS for all my storage, because ZFS detects and repairs data corruption (Windows NTFS can not do this).

If I had used Windows bare metal and virtualized Solaris, then my ZFS data get corrupt when Windows crashes, killing the Solaris VM as well.


I tried this approach twice, but Windows got corrupted and I had to try to rescue it. Which I did not succeed with. So I installed Solaris first, and then everything worked fine.

I did not think about using zones. if that is what you want there is a seemingly endless supply of Sun machines on eBay. I would recommend either a Sunfire V245 or a T2000. The T2000 chips have 8 cores per CPU. There are probably servers with intel chips that probably cost a little more as well.