Dual Booting Solaris and Vista on a T61

Due to changes in the way Vista handles boot blocks, it significantly more painful to dual boot it. Unfortunately, due to only having a "rescue disc" (which I had to burn myself, Lenovo charges extra to ship you one), it's even more painful as you can't just put the Windows disk in to run chkdsk after installing the second OS.

For my own notes (and whoever else might find them useful), this is what I had to do:

  • Burn a rescue image as soon as the machine boots for the first time
  • Download and burn a copy of GParted LiveCD
  • Download the latest copy of OpenSolaris
  • Re-install Windows via the rescue image (note, this will destroy everything on the hard disk as it re-partitions and formats)
  • Boot GParted and go to a command prompt
  • Insert a USB drive and mount it with mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/try
  • Take a copy of the boot blocks (for safety)
mkdir /mnt/try/bootblock
cd $_
for i in sda sda1 sda2
do
  dd if=/dev/$i of=$i bs=512 count=1
done
cd /
umount /mnt/try
  • (Optionally) Mount the Windows partition and remove any software you don't want loaded from .../SWTOOLS/apps/ (I recommend Earthlink, AOL and Norton* )
  • Unmount the Window paritition
  • Run gparted
  • Reduce the Windows partition to the size you need (33000000 for me)
  • Commit the change to gparted
  • Wait 2 hours until it finishes
  • Reboot and let Windows finish installing
    • If you removed anything, it'll get stuck near the end and there will be an alert box hidden behind the "Customizing Software" box. You can move it out of the way with a mouse and just click "skip"
  • Log in (there's some scripting done when you first log in)
  • Open up a command prompt
  • Run the following commands (from http://multibooters.co.uk/ ). These are literals so you can cut and paste.
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} device boot
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot