Editor's Note: As far as I can tell, I was one of the first people to post this information on the alt.solaris.x86 newsgroup. Until this information was released, getting NT and Solaris/x86 to dual boot was not an easy chore. Again, while it is highly possible that someone else knew of this tactic before I found it, they sure didn't post this on the newsgroup. ;-)

Hello everyone,

After many trials and tribulations, I have finally succeeded in getting Solaris 2.6/x86 to work with NT 4.0's boot loader!

The key is BootPart (available at: http://www.winimage.com/ bootpart.htm). Go to the site, d/l ver. 2.20 , extract the zip file, and run the following command (must be logged in as an NT admin or from a DOS boot disk):

bootpart <Solaris Partition ID> c:\bootsect.sun "Solaris 2.6 / x86"

The boot.ini entry added by bootpart is:

c:\bootsect.sun="Solaris"

Pretty simple, eh?

You can obtain the correct partition ID by running bootpart with no arguments. BootPart will then display all of the partitions on your system and their file type. The Solaris partition should be denoted with an asterisk (*) and will be a Linux Swap partition. For instance, my Solaris partition ID was 22 (yeah, i got 25+ partitions - does anyone else have anything close?). The c:\bootsect.sun is the new boot sector that will load that specified partition from NT boot loader. This also works with NTFS drives.

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