RE: Re: The State of Alpha Linux
> As others have mentioned, it's quite adequate for my purposes,
> serving media files; the Silicon Image SATA controller works fine, I
> get excellent NFS performance from it. I don't expect to transcode
> movies with it; I have another computer for that. I kind of like
> having a piece of history which is actually useful to me. But, I
> guess I wouldn't be heartbroken if the Alpha port comes to an end. It
> works now, so if it ain't broke... I may be using it for a while. Now
> if I could just get it to boot from compact flash... I like the zip
> drive idea someone mentioned though... I have an old MO drive, maybe
> I'll try that. All of my old SCSI disks sound sort of like jet engines.
I tried to boot the Alphastation 500/500 from a Compact Flash before using
the SCSI ZIP drive. The problem was that this machine has no IDE controller,
so CF cards are of no use per default. I tried an SCSI-PATA converter (ACARD
AEC-7720UW) combined with an CF-to-PATA adaptor. The SCSI converter was
detected as a SCSI disk from SRM with the name of the CF drive, but it was
not able to boot from it (some IO errors occurred). Another flash disk with
PATA socket (TRANSCEND IDE FLASH MODULE) had the same IO problems. Booting
from a real PATA hard disk worked through this interface, but this was not
what I wanted. The Linux Qlogic driver was also able to use the CF card /
Transcend module on the SCSI-PATA converter, but SRM was not happy with it -
not so nice :(
But the ZIP drive I had somewhere did the trick: No spinning, no power
consumption when not used and SRM can boot from it.
Uwe
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