On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 01:36:46PM -0700, Bill Moseley wrote: > I've had an Alpha on the floor for a year or so and finally trying to > get it running. This is my first experience with this machine. > It currently has Potato installed and I'd like to upgrade to Sarge. I > was thinking about doing a new install, but I can't figure out how to > boot from the CD. > The machine is a AlphaPC 164-LX (the model number on the board is 54-25002-01). > DC Alpha 21164 533Mhz > It currently has Potato on the second IDE partition, swap on third and free > 4GB on forth partition. It won't boot by itself, but from a bit of > paper taped on the machine I can boot like this: > boot: halt > MILO> boot hda2:vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 > and the machine will run. I can mount the IDE cdrom no problem. > I had an Linksys LNE-100TX card and put that into the machine. I can > insmod tulip and the card partially works. I'm assuming the card is > faulty, but I'm not sure. It will sometimes ping my local machines and > sometimes not. > So, I downloaded sarge-alpha-netinst.iso (from > http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/) and burned it to a CD. > I'd like to try the new Debian Installer. Then I tried to follow the > instructions at > http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/alpha/ch-rescue-boot.en.html#s-install-cd > I realize that's for stable and may not work with my ISO. But I'm not > sure. I pushed on regardless: > I went into the AlphaBIOS setup and wasn't clear what to enter. Currently, installing sarge on a machine running AlphaBIOS is not supported. No one has stepped forward to maintain MILO support for sarge (and if you've seen the pedigree of MILO's code, you surely needn't wonder why :). If you don't have any hardware or second OS considerations that prevent it, it is definitely possible to install SRM on a PC164LX. Otherwise, you can install woody and upgrade, or just do a dist-upgrade to sarge from potato (you may want to dist-upgrade to woody first, though, following the installation manual's hints on problematic packages). Cheers, -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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