Preparing a System for Installing Multiple Operating Systems

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If you are installing Oracle Solaris as part of a multiple boot environment system, review the following specifications for various operating systems.

Table 2 Multiple Operating System Environments

Existing Operating System	Description
Microsoft Windows	Set up sufficient disk space for installing the Oracle Solaris release. In this release, Oracle Solaris for the x86 platform installs the new version of the GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB 2). Oracle Solaris recognizes Windows and ensures that Windows partitions remain unchanged during an installation. When the installation completes, and the system reboots, the GRUB 2 menu displays both the Windows and the Oracle Solaris boot entries. For more information about GRUB 2, see Introducing GRUB 2 in Booting and Shutting Down Oracle Solaris 11.3 Systems.
Solaris 10 OS	You cannot use the Live Media installer to install multiple instances of the Oracle Solaris operating system. The text installer, however, supports multiple instances of the Oracle Solaris operating system on the same partition as long as the instances are on different slices. You can use the Live Media and text installers to replace releases starting with Solaris 10 1/06 on an existing system that has multiple instances of Oracle Solaris installed. Note - If you need to preserve a specific Solaris Volume Table of Contents (VTOC) slice in your current operating system, use the text installer.
Extended partitions	If you have another operating system on an extended partition, you do not need to change the existing extended partition during an installation. You can create, resize, or delete an extended partition when you install Oracle Solaris by using either the Live Media installer, the text installer or the Automated Installer. You can also choose to install Oracle Solaris on a logical partition within an extended partition.