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irasnyd
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Joined: 16 Feb 2003
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 25, 2003 1:05 am    Post subject: Help on Alpha Reply with quote

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!
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irasnyd
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 25, 2003 4:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

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?
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airbatica
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Joined: 07 Oct 2003
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 26, 2003 5:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

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)
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irasnyd
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 26, 2003 11:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

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!
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backebergd
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 3:50 pm    Post subject: try a scsi cdrom Reply with quote

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.
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irasnyd
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2004 4:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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.
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