Alpha Jensen Installation Help?

[Aaron Clow <AaronC cmj com>]

I was wondering if someone could help with a Jensen install problem I'm
having? 

> I'm Jim Paradis' installation procedure because I'm having greater
> problems with the aboot version outlined by Michael Schwingen. Anyone
> see any major problems here? Any help would be much appreciated...
> Here's the outline of what I've done so far...
> 
> 1) downgraded the DECpc150's firmware to version 1.7
> 2) uncompressed & rawrote bootdisk.1.3.72.jenxen.srm.gz to floppy
> 3) uncompressed & rawrote pseudo-bootdisk.gz to floppy (planning on
> installing RedHat)
> 4) rawrote current RedHat 5.1 Alpha ramdisk to a floppy
> 5) partitioned hard drive with first partition (4MB) set to filetype
> BOOT <--is this right? should it be ext2?
> 
> Ran through normal installation procedure as outlined: 
> 
> 1) In ARC console, changed floppy config to 1.44 (re-ran ECU)
> 
> 2) In ARC console, ran copyboot using bootdisk.1.3.72.jensen.srm image
> (from /dev/fd0 to /dev/sda) - copy was successful
> 
> Strange thing here though... I noticed in the minlabel setup that my
> first partition was partition 1. I have 5 partitions. The first is a
> 4MB partition with fs BOOT and the rest are ext2. When I went to
> delete partitions, partition 0 was not a valid partition. When
> copyboot writes to the hard drive, it's writing to
> scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)... Is that a concern? Or is
> partition 1 under the minlabel view actually partition 0? If so then
> why can't I delete it?
> 
> yes, I'm a newbie at partitioning this way -- with offsets & such. I'm
> used to fdisk & disk druid.
> 
> 3)  Changed to OSF console, power cycled.
> 
> 4) I don't get a >>> prompt immediately. Instead, I get what looks
> like Linux starting up automatically and get a Kernel panic: VFS:
> Unable to mount root fs on 08:02
> 
> After I break out of that and get back to the command line, if I type
> BOOT -FL INSTALL DKA000 it asks me for the ramdisk. I insert it into
> the floppy drive and it detects a compressed image... Then after a
> while I get an error message - end_request: I/O error, dev 01:00,
> sector 7xxx-8190, where xxx is the beginning of the sector area and
> 8190 is the end...
> 
> Any thoughts? Something obvious?
> 
> Thanks much for any help or suggestions...
> 
> Aaron Clow
> Assistant Webmaster
> College Media, Inc.
> aaronc@cmj.com
> 
>