Continuing to play with the Alpha system (I've never used an Alpha
before - so please excuse my ignorance of some of the stuff I'm
not aware of is basic).
Not having a suitable SCSI controller, I installed an IDE hard drive
and CD-ROM.
The system recognizes both - it lets me partition and format the
hard drive from within the AlphaBIOS menus.
I have a WinNT4 CD with the Alpha release on it, and the "install
Windows NT" option does launch the setup from the CD OK.
Shortly into the setup, it asks what kind of system I have, none
of the options are 164LX, and I don't have a "disk provided by
the manufacturer" for the "Other" option. I tried the various
options provided, hoping one might be close enough to "limp
along", however in all cases it crashes a few steps later (while
"Loading CD-ROM filesystem") - in one case it gets a STOP/
Panic event.
Are the files needed for the 164LX available on the net somewhere?
So far no-one has commented on the "PROTO" designation that is
printed on the CPU - I also noticed that there is a sticker on the back
of the system which reads "Digital Semiconductor Alpha Prototype".
Could the CPU be a prototype of some kind (as far as I can tell, the
board is as someone put it "bog standard").
I did find a 164LX Mainboard Technical manual which seems to exactly
match this board - Looking at the jumper configuration, I realized that
the system when I received it had been configured for 600Mhz - so I
reset the clock speed, and it runs fine, reporting 600Mhz in the startup
screen. Perhaps this is a very early version of the 600Mhz CPU?
Turns out the only jumper that was "wrong" when I got it was a jumper
which is defined as "Select failsafe boot mode" - elsewhere in the
manual it mentions this jumper as "diagnostic monitor".
When the jumper is ON (not the standard position), the board beeps
1, 2, 3 ( beep pause beep beep pause beep beep beep ) - When I
took it off, the board boots up normally ( AlphaBIOS ). - Any info on
the "failsave boot" or "diagnostic monitor" functions available? (the
technical manual just refers you to some WinNT documentation).
Regards,
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools:
www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html