Setting up RedHat 5.1 on the AlphaStation 200

I also have been annoyed by trying to install RedHat on my web auction AlphaStation. This entire document probably shows my ignorance of how Alpha systems work (I've never played with one before) but perhaps my errors will demonstrate problems that the honorable Red Hat programmers would like to take a crack at. My hardware was a DIGITAL AlphaStation 200 / 233mhz from www.webauction.com it has 32mb ram, onboard ether, 1gig conner SCSI disk, external 3x SCSI CD rom, with an (ack) Trident 9685 video card in it. Not bad for $350 :)

Anyway, I had a *lot* of weird errors.

Booting from the CD:

>>> boot dka600 -file kernels/avanti-s.gz -flags "root=/dev/scd0"

would give a bunch of "dka600.6.0.6.0 not ready" errors. Maybe my CD has bad media or my CD-ROM drive is a bit flakey, but I've never seen it before.

once it got past these errors, it seemed to work, mounted the readonly CD filesystem, and would say "running install..." and then jump to the blue screen with an error which read:

Halted CPU 0

halt code = 6
double error halt
PC = fffffc0000463fb0

So, I used RAWRITE.EXE to create the standard RedHat 5.1 (from the PowerTools CD) avanti boot disk and rootdisk:

>>> boot dva0 -file vmlinux.gz -flags "root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1"

This seemed to boot up okay, but after it read in the ramdisk,it would die to the blue screen. Same error as before.

So, I went out and got the latest SRM software from DEC. The web address is around, but you can FTP there and find it by luck.

You need to create a bootable disk using the mkboot.exe program and the fwupdate.exe image file on a DOS machine.

You can get them from my web site at your own risk: MKBOOT.EXE FWUPDATE.EXE

Once you make the disk, boot your Alpha to the SRM prompt

>>> boot DVA0

and follow the instructions to upgrade.

After that, I obtained a copy of MILO to make a MILO boot disk. Based on the solutions that I had seen, you need (?) to boot to MILO to boot a compressed kernel.

So, I obtained a copy of the latest MILO boot disk and created a boot disk from it.

You can get it from my web site at your own ridk: MILO.DD

The next thing I tried was booting from a compressed kernel. I copied the RedHat 5.1 kernels/avanti-s.gz kernel to a MSDOS formatted disk as /vmlinux.gz. That is to say, you have to rename the file to vmlinux.gz and make sure it is in the root directory of the floppy disk.

>>> boot DVA0 (to boot to MILO)

MILO> boot fd0:vmlinux.gz root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1 (to boot the kernel and mount the ramdisk)

This would boot, but upon booting up some of the kernel would spew:

device_interrupt: unexpected interrupt 0

device_interrupt: unexpected interrupt 0

device_interrupt: unexpected interrupt 0

Anyway, after hearing that I should try an older version of the disk images due to a glitch, I went onto the RedHat FTP server and got the RedHat 5.0 compressed kernel image avanti.gz and ramdisk.img files. I copied the avanti.gz file to a MSDOS formatted floppy disk as /vmlinux.gz (as before) and used RAWRITE.EXE to create the ramdisk After creating and booting with these disks:

>>> boot DVA0 (to boot to MILO)

MILO> boot fd0:vmlinux.gz root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=1 (to boot the kernel and mount the ramdisk)

plop in the ramdisk, and everything works. I got the "Welcome to Red Hat Linux" bit and the menus started.

Hope that helps someone.