Installing Solaris 10 as Dual Boot on a Compaq V3070TU

Laptop Config:- Intel Core Duo T2050 @ 1.6 GHz- HDD: 60GB SATA- RAM: 512MB
- Scenario: I had a dual boot laptop with Win XP and Ubuntu 8 installed. Was planning to take the Solaris 10 certification and had to install Solaris.

- Options:
1) Install Solaris 10 within Win XP via VmWare as a virtual OS (Solaris 10 VM version is available on Sun's website).
- Drawback: The laptop got slow running the VM version (had just 512MB of Ram :( ) and noticed that the machine was getting heated up.
2) Install Solaris as a dual boot
This is what I decided to do and here is what happened.
- Downloaded the 5 CD pack from Sun's website.
- Loaded the bootable CD. Everything went smooth till the step where I had to select where the OS had to be installed. I did delete the Ubuntu installation via XP's Disk Manager. This was installed on the Extended Partition. But for some reason, Solaris couldn't see this free space. Hmm... Googled this out and found that Solaris would install only on the Primary Partition of the hard disk.
Back to google again... (what would have happened without them...). Came across Gparted
(http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ ) which is an open source disk partitioning software (similar to partition magic). Gparted can help in shrinking a partition and formatting the disk under different file systems (fat, ntfs, ext3, linux+swap..etc). I had just a GB of space left on the C drive (my primary partition), so shrinking the drive was not an option. So I backed up my entire extended partition (D, E, F - 35GB) to my new USB hard drive (hehe 500GB).
Booted the system via Gparted, deleted all the partitions on the extended drive and created a partition of 10GB as a primary partition to add to the already existing primary partition set aside for the Windows installation. Formatted the new partition as Linux+Swap so that Solaris recognises this partition. Saved the changes, rebooted and ran the Solaris installation.
Solaris recognized the new partition and installed the OS.. :-). Now, I'm dual booting Win XP with Solaris 10 ..(just need to work on some of things that dont work on Solaris.. like audio..)..

Note that this operation took close to 16 hours and loads of research (that took time).
Leave a message if you have any queries... I'll try to help....
Cheers.. :-)