Hi!

I know there is no one size fit all in partitioning an OS especially Solaris.

But I would like to know which slice is recomended to have its own partition and also the recommended size.

I also would like to know the why it is recomended in such a way.

Some infromation to play around with.

20Gb harddisk. Complete dedicated for Solaris.
Usage, workstation.

And also, I have a 20Gb hard drive dedicated to FreeBSD. How do I make Solaris boot FreeBSD.

I wonder will there be a problem since FreeBSD was installed as primary disk, and now being switched to secondary disk.

Thanks in advance

You are correct that there are many ways to partition a disk. I usually go by how the system will be used. For example, a firewall get a larger /var for logfiles. If this is going to be a learning system, I would recommend larger /usr and /export/home slices so that you have plenty of room to install everything and experiment with the various apps. The installation process will tell you what the absolute minimum and recommended sizes are each slice are. Initially set each slice at the recommended size (you'll have plenty of space to spare), and then go back and redistribute your remaining space. Part of really knowing an OS is learning where everything goes. A couple of things to remember: Solaris does install some apps in /opt so either create a separate slice or bump up your root slice. By default, Solaris will use swap space to create /tmp so either make swap large enough or create a separate slice for it.

Yep, I learned a hard way, when I first installed Solaris9 on my work's Ultra10, I partitoned the HDD to have the following sheme
/
/opt
/export/home
/usr
/var
/tmp
swap
and what I haven't thought about is to give /var /tmp and /opt sufficient amount of space, so when I needed to install gcc guess what I got insuficient space error. Now I just said hell with it and did
/
/var
swap
and now I am praying nothing gets corrupted so I won't have to re-install the whole thing. I would get later to the partitioning tools available for Solaris to more less get a good partitioniing theme with 9 GB HDD.