> > Woody boot floppies or new Debian Installer? > > I've downloaded the beta 4 Debian-Installer image and I'll give it a try > at home tonight ... actually I meant to do this over the weekend but the > weather was so good that beer and BBQ's beckoned too strongly; please try > to forgive me :-)
snip ... > I'll try the Installer CD tonight and if that fails fall back onto the > Woody boot floppies as suggested. Hi Helge, now I don't want to appear overly pessimistic but this is not looking particularly promising. Here's where I've got to after this evening's boot attempts. I downloaded the Beta 4 of the Debian Installer for Alpha (both the ISO and the two boot floppies just to be on the safe side) and the Woody floppy images. Attempt 1 - Boot the Installer CD from the AlphaBIOS No joy; the AlphaBIOS refused to budge on this; insisting that the boot configuration was invalid (this was not only during the definition of the boot configuration but also when attempting the boot itself). On closer examination it appears that the reason behind the boot failure is that the milo directory on the CD is empty - no linload.exe, no milo ... ? Onto attempt 2 Attempt 2 - Boot the Installer Floppies from the AlphaBIOS Again - no joy; the AlphaBIOS whinged about an invalid configuration when defining the boot config but I'm getting used to that. This time, when I selected my new floppy based configuration nothing happened. No activity on the floppy drive, no access light flashing, nothing. Attempt 3 - Boot the Installer Floppies from the SRM You've probably guessed but again, no joy. This time, the transcript looked something like this ... >>> boot dva0 -flags 0 (boot dva0.0.0.0.1 -flags 0) block 0 of dva0.0.0.0.1 is not a valid boot block Attempt 4 - Boot the Woody floppies from the AlphaBIOS Exactly the same as for attempt 2 Attempt 5 - Boot the Woody floppies from the SRM Again, the same as for attempt 3 I've also tried the milo images from http://www.suse.de/~stepan which Juhana Paavola suggested in an earlier reply to my initial post; with exactly the same results. I'm getting the feeling that I'm missing out on something fairly fundamental here; but what it is I have no idea at the moment. Sorry to be the bearer of less than glad tidings; any other suggestions most gratefully received. Cheers Gary -- "There are two major products that came out of Berkeley; LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." BOFH Excuse #76: Unoptimised hard drive. Linux, because eventually, you grow up enough to be trusted with a fork()
