opensolaris not ready for prime time

[mellowtigger]

I was really wanting to like OpenSolaris from Sun. I installed it yesterday morning before work and got far enough to see that it didn't recognize my ethernet controller. I didn't mind, though, since it had better initial video drivers than Vista did.  Got back home after work and realized that it messed up a boot record, so I had to reinstall Vista to get Windows working again.

I checked online to see if maybe there were other install options that would make OpenSolaris 'play nice(r)'. Supposedly it already tries to coexist with Windows partitions. I decided to try another install and see if I could spot any options that I just breezed through last time. There weren't really any such options. The installer is otherwise good. I got a working desktop by booting from the cd. I launched the installer and then played Mahjong while the installer did its thing.  Afterwards, I tried booting into Vista again. Unable, again. Okay, so I started on yet another Vista install. Uh oh. Can't.

"Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation."

Yowza! Bad. I tried deleting and recreating the Vista partition. Same error message. Panic time. I booted up my laptop and discovered that Microsoft has a support ticket on that very problem. So from the Vista installer, I used the following commands to get my partition working again...

shift-F10
select disk 0
select partition 1
detail partition
active
exit (or quit or something)

And then Vista installed okay again. Once that hurdle was passed, I went and downloaded EasyBCD for editing the Vista boot data. I created an entry (from the Linux info) for OpenSolaris and rebooted. Sure enough, I got Vista's selection menu and chose the OpenSolaris entry. Then I got stuck in some sort of GRUB command line and had to do the following to get the os to boot properly...

rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
boot

This is getting really tedious, eh?  So OpenSolaris does NOT play well with Vista.  I want to like it, but I really recommend against it for now.