Help on Alpha

irasnyd · Posted: Thu Dec 25, 2003 1:05 am Post subject: Help on Alpha

I just got an alpha system from one of my Dad's coworkers. It is an PC164SX based system with a 533Mhz 21164PC chip. It's got 256MB of RAM and a 4 gig hard drive.

I have no idea how to set this up at all. From what I can tell, I have the AlphaBIOS firmware loaded, and I need to load the SRM firmware instead. I have gotten firmware from here but I cannot get it to upgrade. (I put a floppy disk into my WinXP machine, and write fwupdate.exe and pc164srm.rom to it. I then chose "Update Firmware" in the AlphaBIOS, but it doesn't update.

EDIT: I have gotten the firmware updated to v5.8-1 SRM, so that is no longer an issue.

Any help to get this working would be appreciated. Even if I can get it running WinNT I will be happy, but I would definitely prefer gentoo

Thanks!

irasnyd · Posted: Thu Dec 25, 2003 4:53 am Post subject:

Now that I have it in SRM mode, I cannot get it to boot off of a cd. It only works sometimes, and when it does, it immediately crashes, and starts a printout of the data in the general purpose registers, and other similar information.

Any ideas on this new problem? (I've tried with 2 different cdrom drives).

Perhaps someone can point me towards something that will boot off a floppy?

airbatica · n00b Joined: 07 Oct 2003 Posts: 18 Location: Irving, TX

What type of CD ROM are you trying to boot off of? If its SCSI, check the termination and term power settings on it. If its IDE, well... I don't know what to tell you. You also might want to try an earlier version of the Alpha ISO. I remember having some boot problems with the latest experimental release on my 164LX, which uses the same version of the SRM firmware. (5.8-1)

irasnyd · Posted: Fri Dec 26, 2003 11:35 am Post subject:

I'm using an old Creative 4x IDE CDROM drive.

I think I will try one of the older images (I've used both test3 and test4, both have the same problem so far)

Thanks!

backebergd · n00b Joined: 24 Nov 2003 Posts: 9 Location: Boston, MA

If you have a scsi cdrom floating around, try that instead. The ide cdrom might work, but I've never done it that way. Also, I got the test4 cd to work fine, but the test3 cd gave me problems.

do a "show dev | more" to find out how the ide cdrom is detecting. If you don't get it to detect at all, then you need a scsi cdrom.

Also, it's possible your system is simply unstable. Maybe it has a bad dimm, or a broken cdrom drive, or maybe the cpu is overclocked and you need to clock it down.

irasnyd · Posted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 4:11 pm Post subject:

Okay, thanks for the advice.

I'm gonna get back to it this weekend, after taking a nice long break from playing with it

I'll post here how everything goes.