How can I boot both Solaris/x86 and Win XP/2000/NT on the same disk?
Here’s one way of doing it. Solaris/x86 requires it’s partition to be active and uses it’s own boot manager with it hard-coded to boot to Solaris on timeouts. If you want to use NT’s boot manager or default to another operating system, it usually requires installing both operating systems on separate disks or using a third-party product, such as System Commander, that makes the partition “Active” on the fly This solution, described here by Andrew Mickish, is to make a boot floppy: Although the Solaris x86 installation manual makes it sound like all you have to do is partition your disks to get multiple operating systems to work, I found that this was not the case. To get a dual boot of Solaris and NT on the same hard drive, without using the Solaris default boot manager, you have to use a floppy boot disk to help start one of the OSes. Here is how I got NT and Solaris working on the same disk.