Help with installation of Sun Solaris 10

[wond]

I have a Windows XP media center system on Dell Inspiron 6000. I want to have Solaris 10 dual boot. I downloaded the DVD and CD iso from Sun website (with checksum) and burnt it into CDs & DVDs. However, when i try to boot from the Solaris CD or DVD it just won't boot up (yes - i did give CD/DVD as my first boot device).

I checked many forums and some said because Solaris does not identify DVD by default try booting from CDs. But CDs don't boot up either. Then i went into some Sun blueprints and found that i should use a partition manager (like Ranish). I obviously don't want to mess up a working Windows XP for Solaris installation.

Can someone help me with getting my system dual booted? And yes, i have thought of using a virtual machine but my laptop has 1GB RAM ; so the host OS (win XP) won't have enough RAM to survive if Solaris is on the VM.

I don't want to give up on Solaris either - it is a fantastic system (i have worked on it earlier).

[prashanthpai]

Then i went into some Sun blueprints and found that i should use a partition manager (like Ranish).

Your hard disk partition has nothing to do with the disc not able to boot. The partition thing comes into picture only if you are going to install Solaris. First check whether the disc is bootable by checking it on any other PC.

[wond]

Checked that on another laptop. The DVD does not boot there either. However when i open the disc from win XP i see the Solaris installation files - the iso has been properly extracted.
I installed Sun's virtualbox yesterday ; just to give it a shot. Virtualbox identified the disc properly and started installation - but failed after a certain point when it found that the RAM was not enough to be shared between solaris and the host system (win XP).
Help !!

[hellnoire]

Did you burn it as a DATA CD? Or as a Bootable one?

[wond]

I burnt it as a bootable DVD.
I also learnt from a forum yesterday that the DVD iso from sun website is not a bootable one. They have recommended downloading CD1 and then inserting the DVD when it asks for CD2.
How can an org like sun make such a faux pas? Anyway, i will try that and report back.