Alpha on FreeBSD

[rglasnap at nmt.edu]

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003, Wilko Bulte wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 01:27:23PM -0600, rglasnap at nmt.edu wrote:
> > Hi, I've got a Digital Alpha Personal Workstation 500a a.k.a. Miata. I was 
> > able to install FreeBSD just fine however I experienced problems after a 
> > while of running FreeBSD. While booting the kernel had problems reading 
> > from the harddrive and would have to do an ata reset a couple of times. 
> > After some troubleshooting I determined that the IDE controllers on the 
> > motherboard were almost dead. So I went out and bought a PCI IDE 
> > controller. SRM did not see anything attached to the new IDE controller so 
> 
> Unfortunately the SRM is quite picky in what it accepts as an IDE controller
> to boot from,
> 
> > I tried hooking up the cdrom to the old IDE controller and booting the 
> > freebsd 5.1 CD. This worked and everything was fine, except I can't boot 
> > from SRM. I know there are bootable floppies for install, but how can I 
> > make a bootable floopy that will just boot and not run the FreeBSD 
> > installer?
> 
> You should be able to just stick the bootblocks on floppy and have it boot
> the IDE disk from there.
I've been looking for instructions on how to do that. I'm assuming I have 
to grab something with dd, but I'm not sure what.

--Ryan

> 
> Alternatively you could find yourself a small SCSI disk and use that to
> boot from the SRM.
> 
> Wilko
> 
> -- 
> |   / o / /_  _   		wilko at FreeBSD.org
> |/|/ / / /(  (_)  Bulte				
> 

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