Alpha PWS 433a and Adaptec AHA-294X Boot Blues
I've come into possession of a DEC Personal Workstation 433a and am having
a singular lack of success in persueding this box that it wants to run
Debian.
A bit of history first; the box originally came preloaded with the, now
obsolete, 64-bit version of Windows NT and subsequently had an old version
of Debian installed on it, as part of an abortive attempt to use it as
some sort of X workstation. This failed due to the appalling resolution
that the onboard graphics card gave ... and then the machine came my way.
On it's way, someone *cough cough* "played" with the disk configuration in
the AlphaBIOS and managed to totally wipe the partition tables.
The hardware configuration pans out as follows:-
Digital Personal Workstation 433a
Alpha 21164, 433 MHz
AlphaBIOS revision 5.70
DEC RZ1CB 4 Gb hdd
Toshiba XM5701TASUN12XCD0997 CD drive
WangDAT 3100 DAT drive
Adaptec AHA-294X SCSI adaptor
Advance Logic ALG 2064i, 1024K RAM
So far, so good. However, when I boot the machine, either via the
JumpStart CD or via a floppy based linload->MILO boot configuration,
almost everytime the boot of the kernel hangs after the following
diagnostics ...
(scsi0) <Adaptec AHA-294x UltraSCSI host adaptor> found at PCI 1/9/0
(scsi0) Wide Channel, SCSCI ID=7, 16/255 SCBs
(scsi0) Cables present (INT-50 YES, INT-68 YES, EXT-68 NO)
(scsi0) Downloading sequencer code ... 422 instructions downloaded
scsi0: Adaptec AHA 274x/284x/294x (EISA/VLB/PCI-Fast SCSI) 5.1.31/3.2.4
<Adaptec AHA-294X Ultra SCSI host adaptor>
scsi: 1 host.
and there we hang. Note that I say this "almost" always happens as I did
manage to get linload.exe and MILO installed and the JumpStart CD
partitioned the drive.
But this is the only time I've aver been able to progress past the
diagnostics above (apologies if there's any typos - I copied it by hand
from the Alpha console monitor).
Some pretty serious Googling has only managed to provide one clue and
that's about "disabling auto negotiation" on the SCSI adaptor, but what
settings should be enabled I haven't been able to find out.
The frustrating thing is that I _know_ this box is capable of running
Debian (even though only via the AlphaBIOS as the onboard SCSI adaptor
doesn't seem to be supported by the SRM) as I've seen it with my own two
eyes.
So unless I'm missing something blindlingly obvious, the only solution I
can come up with is some form of intermittent hardware failure.
Can anyone shed any light on this?
Cheers,
Gary
--
"There are two major products that came out of Berkeley; LSD and UNIX.
We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
BOFH Excuse #76: Unoptimised hard drive.
Linux, because eventually, you grow up enough to be trusted with a fork()
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