Solaris "laptop friendly" release doesn't like Dell laptops

Now I know the pain of not "running Sun on Sun" (our old mantra in the office).....

Have a nice shiny laptop here, running windows but with a ton of free space on the drive. Decided over the weekend in a fit of madness to throw solaris on it, so I took one of the DVDs I burned before I left (S11 intel) and threw it on. For one thing it took forever to pick up the installer GUI (had to reboot maybe a dozen times before it picked it up), and then it wouldn’t recognize the network card, but I was sort of expecting that not to work. Then I went to reboot into windows, and discovered that I couldn’t login.

It seems that while the installer was smart enough to pick up that I had a windows partition and added it to the grub boot menu, it didn’t quite know what to do with the Dell system restore partition that you get with all dells these days. That partition is supposed to be marked as hidden, but now it wasn’t and so it came up on windows as C: and my C: drive went to E:. Problem with this was that the windows login was expecting to find the home dirs in C:\Documents and Settings not E:\Documents and Settings – so no-one could login, and the machine didn’t seem to be able to reset it to C. Took the admin here most of the morning to try to fix it (partition magic couldn’t even fix it) and in the end we took the nuclear option and just wiped it and re-installed the whole damn thing. So, all the crap I’ve set up on the lappy in the last week, and all the work stuff that was pre-installed for me, was hosed.

So, to list my problems:

• First prob was the installer kept freezing on "setting up java...." or some msg like that, no matter what install choice you picked - took maybe 20 or 30 reboots to get past it - and even then it still took maybe 10mins or longer to come up
  
• Second prob was the network card (Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx) wasn't picked up. 'ifconfig -a' gave me nothing, then I managed to use the GNOME network admin tool to get it picked up, but after that the machine wouldn't boot up as it kept timing out on some pci device (am assuming it was the network card as it worked before I config'ed it). Reinstalled again as I couldn’t get past it and the next time when I tried to run the network admin tool it froze and eventually crashed gnome - every time.
  
• The machine comes with an 80Mb partition for the Dell System Diagnostics at the start of the drive which is supposed to be hidden, but Solaris set it as unhidden. Straight away, windows picked it up as c:, the c: drive as e: and kept dying on login looking for c:\documents and settings. There seemed to be no way to reset this - even if we set the partition back as hidden windows couldn’t pick up the main partition as c:. This is probably more a windows problem than a solaris one, but solaris shouldn't have caused the prob in the first place.
  

And this was build 55b, the build that was supposed to be Solaris Developer Express, the “laptop-friendly” release!