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Re: Alpha xl266



On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Donald R. Spoon wrote:

> I have a XL300 here, which I think is a "kissing cousin" to the XL266 so
> maybe my parameters will work for you.  If you can get to the milo
> prompt, here is what I use for booting off the boot-floppies:

I have a XL366, which is a bit further off, but still a "kissing cousin".
:) The last time I setup this machine with Debian (potato), this is how I
did it:

	*) Setup alphaBIOS to boot an operating system off of A: as drive,
'\linload.exe' as the file, and the OS path pointing to a valid DOS or FAT
partition [0]. Leave OS options blank for now.

	*) Inserted a floppy disk into the machine that had linload.exe
[1] and the milo image for the XLT [2], and execute the OS setup described
above in AlphaBIOS.

	*) At the milo prompt, I entered 'boot fd0:vmlinuz root=/dev/fd0
load_ramdisk=1', inserted the Debian rescue disk and pressed enter.

	*) After a bit the Debian root disk is prompted for, so I inserted
that and pressed enter.

	*) Now the standard Debian install appears and you are set to go
from there.

	*) After the install, note that you must have a small DOS or FAT
partition on the HD to store linload.exe and your milo image. Then modify
the above OS setup in AlphaBIOS to boot from the hard disk instead and put
the necessary milo command line (i.e. 'boot sda3:vmlinuz
root=/dev/sda3') in the OS options field.

Yea, it is not exactly simple or straight forward, but doable. If you have
any other questions about the setup or boot on the XL, I will be more than
glad to help. TTYL.

[0] This can be something of a pain if you don't already have a disk with,
say, WinNT on it installed in the Alpha. This requirement can be avoided
by upgrading AlphaBIOS to the most recent version (4.66 for the XL366),
which will only complain about non-DOS partitions being specified in OS
setup, instead of stopping you cold in tracks over them. 

[1] Copy linload.exe as named to the floppy, it is included with the
Debian disks-alpha files. On a debian mirror this would be in
.../debian/dists/potato/main/disks-alpha/current/MILO.

[2] Copy the milo for your system from the same place as the linload.exe
file is found to the floppy and name it 'milo'. Note also, that the XL266
is a different architecture from the XL300/366. The latter uses the 'xlt'
milo, while the former uses the 'xl' milo. 

	PS. If you haven't already noticed, I have spent a lot of time
with getting Linux to boot on XLTs. They are nice machines, just that
AlphaBIOS, with all of its nice GUIs, is often a pain to deal with. :)

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|   "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."                    |
|                                            --- Philippians 1:21 (KJV)   |
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|   Ryan Kirkpatrick  |  Boulder, Colorado  |  http://www.rkirkpat.net/   |
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