Digital Alpha PWS500a

[ddew]

Ok, since toying around with the SGIbox has been put on hold atm I figured I'd reinstall gentoo on my DEC Alpha.

Specs:
Digital Alpha PWS500a (Miata)
128mb RAM
2x4gb HD
The SCSIcontroller went dead on me so no scsi.

Anyway, since I don't have a CD on it I figured I'd install Debian Woody on one of the drives and then install gentoo on the other.

Now the problem I have is that appearantly debians tar can't handle gentoo stages properly(?), because I've tried three different stages from the experimental dir. It extracts to about /usr/lib then stops saying something about 'This doesn't look like something something Unrecoverable error' I've tried it with one stage3 and two stage2 tar.bz2. Since it won't work work with neither file and the md5sum checks out on them I assume that debians tar is at fault.

Any other way to get a gentoo install going? Like floppies etc. I tried with the bootdisks for deb but they wouldn't unpack the files either.

Any tips or pointers to 'guides for stubborn alphas' would be appreciated.

TAI