I got a pair of axp164UX machines, which I am now trying to get debian installed onto.
Of course they use ARCS rather than SRM, so installing is going to be non trivial (I also got a Multia with SRM which boots the install CD just fine, except the TGA console shows nothing, and when booted with a serial console it dies with out of memory, which I guess is reasonable with 32MB ram in the system). Now supposedly woody works on the 164UX and supports installing with milo. I grabbed the ruffian milo disk, put it on a floppy, booted it, and then tried to get it to load the rescue disk next, but milo simply gives an error about being unable to determine the filesystem on the floppy (and spits on a line of text that looks a lot like the FAT12 header that would be on the rescue disk). I have tried multiple floppies, I tried a different floppy drive, I tried other versions of milo I found after much searching, and so far nothing works. As soon as milo is loaded, it no longer has a clue how to read from the floppy (even gives io errors every once in a while). Directory listings of a FAT16 drive on hda1 work just fine. As another experiment I tried putting milo and the install kernel and initrd for etch onto the fat partition (by putting the drive in a PC) and then booting that, but it seems milo has no idea how to load an initrd, or at least not the one from etch so that didn't seem to work either. I guess I should try putting the woody kernel onto the HD, but then I have no idea what to do about rescue, root and drivers1/2. Should I extract the drivers tgz onto the hd as well along with the contents of the root disk onto a small ext2 partition and then point milo at the woody install kernel and the small ext2 partition? I found a page that says that etch should still run on a machine booted with milo as long as you have your own way of getting milo on there and configured, so I figure there is still hope here. With a 600MHz 21164A and 128MB ram (which I will probably upgrade to 512MB if I get it working), it seems like it should be at least a decent alpha box to play with. So any ideas? Does it seem the floppy controller is broken on this machine or is there some configuration setting in the ARCS BIOS I have to fiddle with to make this thing boot? -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]