PWS500a (Mitia) first install

[David O'Brien]

On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 11:32:41PM +0200, Ulrich wrote:
> Hi Everybody 
> 
> I'm familiar with x86 based FreeBSD for about 4 years using 4.1 - 4.9 on an 
> Intel box. 
> 
> I bought a used PWS500a with two 2 GB disks attached to an Adaptec2940(UW) 
> SCSI controller and a Toshiba ATAPI CD-ROM drive attached to a second SCSI 
> bus. From the FreeBSD technical documentation I learnt that it isn't 
> possible to boot from SCSI disks attached to an Adaptec controller. Since 
> I'm also familiar with Alphas I know that it isn't that simple to boot them 
> from floppy either. 
> 
> I would be happy if someone could give me some advice what I should buy and 
> how I should proceed to get the box running freebsd 4.11. I thought of 
> buying an IDE disk and removing the 2 small SCSI disks which have 
> Windows/NT 4 installed on them. I already opened the box and detected that 
> there isn't much space left so I doubt whether I find a place where I can 
> put the IDE drive. 

I would buy a Qlogic 1040 or LSI 'sym(4)' card cheep on eBay.  The IDE
conroller in the PWS500a is simply a POS.

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)