Booting installation CD on Alpha

[kenviro]

I currently have a Digital Server 5000 Model 5305 6533A. The processor in the machine is Digital Alpha 21164. There is 384MB RAM on this machine. Windows NT 4.0 Server was previously installed on this machine.

Now, I am trying to install FreeBSD 5 on it. I read the documentation on how to setup FreeBSD on the machine and it says that I first need to go to SRM mode (as opposed to be in the AlphaBIOS mode) and boot into the FreeBSD CD-ROM from there.

I first went to the Alpha setup menu by pressing F2. From there, I pressed F6 for Advanced Menu. I pressed <TAB> a few times until I came to Console Selection. I can choose between Windows NT Console (AlphaBIOS), OpenVMS (SRM) and Digital Unix Console (SRM). So, I chose Digital Unix Console (SRM) and then when I restart the machine, it will boot to this prompt.

After that, in order to boot from the FreeBSD CD-ROM, according to

http://people.freebsd.org/~bmah/rel...tion-alpha.html

, I should type 'boot xxxx' where xxxx is the SRM name of the CD-ROM. To find out what is the SRM name of the disks in the machine, I should type 'show device'.

So, I typed 'show device'. The output that I got was:
polling ncr0 (NCR 53C810) slot 1, bus 0 PCI, hose 1 SCSI Bus ID 7
polling floppy0 (FLOPPY) PCEB - XBUS hose 0
dva0.0.0.1000.0 DVA0 RX23
polling dac0 (Mylex DAC960) slot 2, bus 0 PCI, hose 0
dra0.0.0.2.0 DRA0 2 Member RAID 0
polling ncr1 (NCR 53C875) slot 0, bus 2 PCI, hose 0 SCSI Bus ID 7
polling ncr2 (NCR 53C875) slot 1, bus 2 PCI, hose 0 SCSI Bus ID 7
polling tulip (DECchip 21140 - AA) slot 2, bus 2, hose 0
ewa0.0.0.2002.0 00-06-2B-00-15-A9 Twisted Pair



There was no mention of any CD-ROM, so I was thinking that it was not detected. To make sure anyway, I typed 'set OS_type NT' to set it back to AlphaBIOS and restarted the machine to see what are the devices that are initialized. And one of the devices that I could see initialized was the CD-ROM drive. It'll say
&quot;Initializing AIC78XX #0 ...
Device CD-ROM SCSI ID:4 DEC RRD46 (C) DEC 1337&quot;

That means the machine sees the CD-ROM drive. If that's the case, why is it that when I type 'show device' I don't see any mention of the CD-ROM drive?

I hope you can help me with this problem, because I would really like to install FreeBSD on this Digital Alpha machine of mine.

Thank you.


Kingsley

 

[AHinMaine]

that's whacky. what's your internet connection? I found it very easy to take floppy images and do an ftp install. Just do a minimal install and install what you need afterwards. --
Andy

http://www.nachoz.com