Congrats to great boot floppies

[Christian Meder <meder@isr.uni-stuttgart.de>]

Hi David,

I just wanted to thank you for doing a _great_ job on the new boot floppies.

I've done three installs from scratch now on different machines and they all 
worked great (lx164, as255 aka avanti and as200 aka avanti).

lx164 was done from alphabios via milo. people (like me) with half-flash
boards (like sx164 and lx164) with Adaptec controllers should stay with 
alphabios as srm can't boot from Adaptecs (right, Jay ?). I'll file a (minor) 
documentation bug against the alpha boot floppies doc. 

I just tried boot floppies. I didn't boot from a CD.

I'll just summarize the alpha specifics for lx164 (alphabios boot)
step by step as a reference:

* upgrade your firmware as suggested in the alpha install docs. For alphabios
it's easy just follow the NT instructions, you need a DOS formatted floppy.
copy over fwupdate.exe and choose 'Alphabios upgrade' from your alphabios
setup (for srm see below)

* copy linload and the milo for your machine to a DOS formatted floppy

* create an entry MILO in your OS selection setup of Alphabios 
(ignore the warnings about the name). select A: as boot device and 
linload.exe as bootloader
  
* boot MILO. at the milo prompt type the following (as described in the
alpha install docs):
>> boot fd:linux.gz root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1

* start installation 

* partion with a DOS label (as suggested in the advice during the install 
process). make a small (2-5 mb) DOS partition (don't forget to set the type 
of the DOS partition). 

* 'Make hdd bootable' did the magic and formatted the DOS partition and copied
linload and milo from the boot floppy over to the hdd. Quite satisfying ;-)

* upon reboot enter the setup of the alphabios and create in os settings
an entry before MILO called e.g. LINUX. set boot device to the first disk, 
first partition, set bootloader to linload.exe, set secondary boot loader 
arguments to 'boot sda2:vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2' and boot

* the rest should be Debian generic

alpha specifics for avantis (srm boot, note that with ^C you enter the srm
console) 

* (optional but recommended) upgrade your srm firmware. this is slightly more 
tricky than alphabios as there are no easy options you could use from a pure 
GNU/Linux setup. my best option was to use the Digital Unix instructions and 
use the mkbootfirm utility to produce a bootable firmware upgrade floppy. 
Unfortunately mkbootfirm is a _dynamically_ linked DU binary so you need an 
Linux alpha with DU libs.
Jay, would it be possible to produce a statically linked mkbootfirm for the
Linux community or even better the source code for mkbootfirm ? Any chance
that mkbootfirm works on a i386/Linux platform ? 

* enter srm console and do a 'boot dva0'

* start installation

* partion with a BSD label (again as suggested in the advice), leave the 
first cylinder empty for aboot

* 'Make hdd bootable' writes aboot to the first cylinder and it works, 
that is, if you set bootdef_dev to dka0 and auto_action to boot in srm ;-)

So the alpha specific features work great if you follow the instructions.

I'll probably go over the alpha install docs in my copious free time (tm) 
and propose a couple of enhancements but don't hold your breath.



				Christian

-- 
Christian Meder, email: meder@isr.uni-stuttgart.de
 
What's the railroad to me ?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows, 
It sets the sand a-blowing,
And the blackberries a-growing.
                      (Henry David Thoreau)