Re: Debian Installation upon an Alpha Server 4000 5/400

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 11:44:16PM -0400, Robert Garron wrote:

The issue is booting Debian Disk1 KDE on an Alpha Server 4000 5/400
system -- after many iterations and contortions with different Ultra Wide
Differential SCSI controllers -- I was able to utilize an Adaptec
AHA-2944UW controller card to have Debian locate a disk and complete a full
installation 99% successfully.

The last 1% is the booting of the formated, file system created, installed
Debian system which does NOT boot with the AHA-2944UW controller because
the driver for this card is in the distribution and thus found a disk
during the cdrom boot process, but the Alpha BIOS does NOT know about this
card so any "auto" boot sequence is out of the question... So reporting to
Debian my experience(s) is that:

*** the Adaptec AHA-2944UW - ultra wide differential scsi card is NOT
supported in the BIOS of Alpha Server 4000 and 4100's

I know nothing about Alphas, so my questions will be of generic
how-to-get-the-beast-to-boot nature rather than 'ideally...'.

What hardware do you have that the bios will boot? Does the box have a
floppy or CD that will boot? Will a grub-disk of some sort work? Can
you make a boot CD with a boot-loader and kernel that then points to the
root directory on the hard drive? What about net-booting?

Doug.


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