seeking Alphaserver 1000A advice and help [FIXED]

[KozmoNaut]

I recently aquired an Alphaserver 1000A 5/400 with 384MB ram and a healthy helping of disks (more than enough for a 2-disk RAID1 system disk and a 5-disk RAID5 for data).

Now, the first problem was actually getting something to boot. FreeBSD 5.4, 5.3 and 5.2 were no good. 5.1 boots fine though, as does NetBSD 2.0.2 and Gentoo 2005.0, but neither of them sees the 4gig RAID1. I caught a glimpse of the FreeBSD boot and it sees the drive, but I can't label nor partition it. Any helpful pointers?

Another thing that bugs me is that the config tool for the DAC960 RAID controller does not seem to like arrays bigger than 32768MB, which is a damn shame, seeing as I have a bunch of 36GB drives that I'd like to use for a big RAID5 array. I tried upgrading the firmware, but even though it was the version referenced in the documentation, I get a "wrong version image" error. Any tips on the DAC960, or should I use the integrated ISP1020 controller instead?

Thanks in advance!


UPDATE:

I got the firmware updated using a DEC-supplied firmware, as it turns out the DAC960 is in fact a KZPSC-XB, which is almost but not quite the same thing. But no luck on the array size thing


UPDATE 2:

Appearantly, the limit is not on array size, but on the size of the logical drives withing the array. So I have to use 4 32768MB drives and one ~7500MB drive on the 5 36GB-disk RAID5 array. It's better than nothing, but not quite as good as one big drive


UPDATE 3:

Appearantly, FreeBSD 4.11 can label the disks fine, so I'll do that and then install 5.1 and upgrade to 5.4 when it's out for Alpha. Haven't figured out quite why 4.11 can only label 4 drives. I have 6 logical drives and 4.11 is the only *BSD I've found that can do it

[KozmoNaut]

I installed FreeBSD 5.4 on it via the 5.1 CD (later CDs won't boot for some reason), but then it wouldn't boot (same error as the CDs). I'm very much contemplating throwing Gentoo on there if I can get it working with the NIC, but I really wanted to use FreeBSD or NetBSD on it

[KozmoNaut]

Finally!

I had the idea to take a better look around inside the machine, and what did I find? The 4 bottom-most PCI slots are marked as "Aux. Slots", probably meaning they piggy-back off something else.

I moved the RAID controller to one of the primary PCI slots (this thing's got 7 PCI slots and 2 EISA slots... plenty to choose from) and suddenly, everything works perfectly