I'm a complete Solaris and I'm trying to install Solaris alongside Debian Etch. (Hopefully without losing my Debian Install.)

However, the Solaris installer doesn't like my Linux partitions, and wants to nuke the whole disc. I have my documents backed up, I just don't want to have to go through re-installing Debian and tweaking it back into what I had before.

Currently my disc is partitioned as below:

The highlighted partitions are my Debian install and my documents, respectively.

I don't think this is quite right, so I'm looking for some guidance.

You are planning to install Solaris on hda6. Unfortunately Solaris requires a primary partition so the only choice you have with your current partitioning is to install Solaris on hda2. Solaris 10 and newer make no use of a boot partition (be), grub is used and the boot data is on the ufs file-system.

Ah, OK.
So, if I understand you correctly, I should change hda2 to type 'bf' and install on that.
If that's all then I have no problem with that.

Yes. Perhaps is it not even necessary. You should just be able to tell the installer to use the second partition.

Ok. I've renamed hda2, because (IIRC) It only shows the first four partitions in the installer, and I'm going to go install.

Wish me luck.

You'll need to add Debian to your grub menu.lst in Solaris because the Solaris installer replaces your MBR a la winbloze.

It has no other choice, has it ?

If you're saying "what else could it do?" then I suppose I have to agree with you because Solaris seems to have been engineered to have an unhealthy dependency on a customised version of Grub.

If it weren't for that, the installer could give you a choice not to install a bootloader like installers for other UNIX-like OS (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD) and all Linux distros do. Then you wouldn't automatically lose the ability to boot your pre-existing OS after installing Solaris.

Since it seems to be the standard to be able to choose not to update the MBR and only Winbloze and Solaris are the exceptions, it's worth pointing this out to someone asking questions on multibooting with Solaris. That was the point I was trying to make.

What do you mean by "unhealthy" ?

What's wrong with picking Grub, an open source boot loader which is not bound to a single O/S and add the capability to directly boot Solaris ufs (and now ZFS) to it ?
But won't you loose the ability to boot Solaris then ?
Are you sure Solaris installs grub in the MBR ? I thought Grub was installed on the Solaris partition and that Solaris partition was made active, which indeed implies a minor but recoverable change in the MBR.

It seems to me that Grub can only be booted directly by this customised version of Grub which Solaris patched to work with their OS. I think it would be better if you could boot Solaris with the bootloader of your choice like you can do with all the other UNIX-like OS (BSD) and Linux distros I mentioned.

Grub is certainly in the top 2 bootloaders in my view but if I understand correctly, Solaris has their own patched version of Grub and implies that you MUST use Grub to boot Solaris. I didn't see that any BSD or Linux distro say that you MUST use a certain bootloader to boot their OS.

No, I tested this in LILO. What you have to do is boot Solaris as chainloader entry like you do with Windows or an OS that LILO can't boot (or you don't want, for some reason) to boot directly. As long as Grub is installed in the partition superblock this works fine, but it's not very pretty since you get the LILO menu for all your OS and then you get a Grub menu when you select Solaris. In all other chainloading situations I've seen (which includes all of the BSD, Winbloze, and Linux) you can boot everything in one hop: even though LILO does give control to the 2nd stage bootloader on the superblock when he boots a chainloaded OS the user doesn't see it. All he has to do is select it from the LILO menu. But with Solaris, because of the dependence on Grub, you have to go through two bootloader menus.

You may be correct, I can't remember. My PC that I had Solaris on died so I can't check. I think I remember that it updated the MBR but I cannot be sure.

It would be great if every boot loader would be able to boot Solaris, unfortunately, they can't. Solaris used to have its own proprietary boot loader, and I think it was a smart move to substitute it by the most flexible available (GRUB).
Only a boot loader that support your O/S can boot it, there is no generic way to boot an O/S, and in particular no generic way to access a file on a given file-system. Neither the stock GRUB nor Lilo can boot Solaris and this cannot be changed on the O/S side. A boot loader must be aware of the target O/S to be able to boot it. There is no other choice.
Actually, you can setup a system where the main bootloader is Lilo which pass the control to Solaris GRUB thus booting it directly. You simply need to set the timeout to 0 in the Solaris boot menu.lst.
I personally prefer to have Solaris grub being the first called, as it can boot every O/S around, well perhaps not Mac OS/X but I have no Mac anyway.
I found this statement on an interesting blog with some details about Grub enhancements made by the Solaris engineering ( http://blogs.sun.com/szhou/entry/sol...b_enhancements ) :
The standard installation procedure does not put GRUB stage1 in the master boot sector.