Re: AlphaBIO setup for 21064 and Red Hat install

[Alan Young <ayoung teleport com>]

Hi,

dca2 wrote:
> 
> Hi Again,
>
>I spent some time with all of this last night. Here are some symptoms. I am not
>altogether sure that the problem is SCSI and termination.
> 
>1) Neither of the two HS's on the wide felt like they were spinning up. They just
>don't feel like my other 2 IDE's. These are IBM 0662 1G SCSI harddrives.

This can be ok.  Some drives do not start spinning immediately upon powerup.
They can wait until the first read/write command comes to the drive.  A drive
can be forced to spin up by having the SCSI card a "start-unit" command across
the SCSI bus to each target (hard drive,tape drive, CD, etc.) upon powerup.
This is set in the SCSI card's BIOS (if it has one).  Some drives also have a
jumper to imediately spin up or to delay by various amounts.  The delay is
useful so you don't put a sudden strain on the power supply with a bunch of
drives powering up all at once...

>2) I took out one drive in the chain, and set jumpers to terminate the single
>drive. I tried both drives this way. I put the drive in the last connector on the
>cable. The middle connector being open.

This sounds like it should work.  Perchance, do you have a spare SCSI cable to
swap with?
 
<snip>

>4) In all of these scenerios I have tried to invoke the "install new firmware".
>The busy light comes on at the floppy drive yet it comes back "device error".
>The files on the floppy are the files from Digital's update 4.49-7.

Check that the floppy cable is connected correctly.  On the PC64 board, pin 1
is toward the outer edge of the board.  There is a little ^ mark below pin 1.
The red lined edge of the floppy cable should line up to this edge of the
connector.  Check the other end of the cable on the floppy drive too.  I
believe most drives put pin 1 on the left edge of the connector, so the red
lined edge should line up there too.

>5) One option might be a syntax left over from the old owner. When I try to "run
>a program" in BIOS I am using the command "cd:\alpha\setupldr" as WindowNT
>suggests. Is the syntax wrong? When I try to use the "Install Windows NT" it
>comes back with a different error - No CDRom found.

I think you need to check what is being recognized by the hardware.  When you
boot, you will see a message "Initializing device drivers:" followed by the
ID of the adapter.  On my PC64 I get "Initializing device drivers: AHA1542 
ATAPI  OK...".  There is a option that displays what hardware has been
found by the ARC.  From the main ARC menu, choose "Supplementary Menu"
and then "Display Hardware Config".  On the second screen you will get
a display like:

multi(0)video(0)monitor(0)
multi(0)key(0)keyboard(0)
multi(0)key(0)mouse(0)
multi(0)disk(0)fdisk(0)  (removable)
multi(0)serial(0)
multi(0)serial(1)
scsi(0)disk(2)rdisk(0)   (5 partitions) SEAGATE ST12550N 
scsi(1)cdrom(0)fdisk(0)  (removable)    SONY    CD-ROM CDU311

The line multi(0)disk(0)fdisk(0) indicates a floppy drive.  The scsi() lines
indicate scsi adapters and what devices are on them.  In my case, scsi(0)
is the Adaptec 1542.  The disk() number is used to indicate what SCSI ID
the device has.  In my case, it is 2 for a Seagate Barracuda.  In my list
above, scsi(1) is actually the IDE bus.  The ARC views the IDE bus as
another SCSI controller/bus.  And it shows I have a SONY IDE CD-ROM on it.

I hope this helps,

Alan