My experience with the April 2020 Alpha iso Booted fine, asked for me to load qlogic/1040.bin on removable media. I downloaded the deb file for buster, exploded it and copied all the bin files onto both a floppy and a USB stick. The AlphaServer 1200 has a USB card in a PCI slot. Put both the USB and the floppy into the Alpha Said yes, look for files on removable media. It did not seem to poll either the USB or the floppy (eg floppy light never came on; USB LED was on but never flashed) Then I got the same screen about loading firmware from removable media. Exited to shell.
# find /dev -iname "*usb*" /dev/bus/usb # find /dev -iname "*fd*" /dev/fd There is no device (fd0) for the floppy in /dev. # mountmedia fails, complaining that /dev/fd0 does not exist dmesg showed that Debian has noticed the USB PCI card and the memory stick and read off the vendor and product IDs, but the volume was not mounted anywhere. lsusb is missing from busybox, but lspci shows the USB controller no worries. # blkid -c /dev/null shows no output at all /dev/disk contains only by-path/ and the entry in here corresponds to the CDROM drive the install disk is in, there are no other devices listed. I am happy to hear suggestions on how to get the firmware into the installer. The lack of media makes it hard to capture the installer output, dmesg output or anything like that. I can try if that is likely to help. Cheerio