Guidelines for Partitioning a System Prior To Installation
 | Caution - Remember to back up your system prior to partitioning the hard drive. |
When installing Oracle Solaris from the Live Media ISO image or from the text installer image, you can use the entire disk or you can install the operating system on a partition. In addition, on a SPARC client, the text installer can install on a slice.
You can create a partition for installing Oracle Solaris prior to installation using commercial products or open-source tools. Or, you can create a partition during the Oracle Solaris installation. On x86 based systems, the Oracle Solaris installers use GRUB 2, which supports booting multiple operating systems on one or more drives. After partitioning and installing the various operating systems, you can deploy any of them by selecting the appropriate menu entry in the GRUB 2 menu at boot time.
For more information about GRUB 2, see Introducing GRUB 2 in Booting and Shutting Down Oracle Solaris 11.2 Systems .
Note - If you create Linux-swap partitions, note that Linux-swap uses the same partition ID that Oracle Solaris uses. During the installation, in the disk partitioning step, you can change the Linux-swap partition to an Oracle Solaris partition.