Hi, As far as I understand, it seems that booting a SCSI drive (disk, cdrom) on alpha needs a (non-free) firmware for the QLOGIC chip (see the thread following [1] for an example and the answer of Michael Cree)
This firmware should be loaded somehow : embedded in the (tainted) kernel (as suggested in [1]), included in the initramfs or loaded from a floppy at boot time (if the floppy drive is still functional and there is a floppy driver in the kernel). These firmwares are packaged in : firmware-qlogic (non-free) which is not mirrored on ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports but on regular mirrors. I hope it will help ! Many thanks for all this work towards a (smoothly) working install CD for alpha - and especially for fixing the generic kernel and assembling the CD (I am not able to test currently, sorry) Regards, JH Chatenet [1] : https://lists.debian.org/debian-alpha/2017/11/msg00000.html