Subject: Booting NetBSD-alpha
To: None <port-alpha@NetBSD.ORG>
From: (Mark J. Taylor) <mtaylor@cybernet.com>
List: port-alpha
Date: 02/29/1996 01:05:55
We have several DEC-alpha based machines running Windows/NT 3.51 here.
I'd like to install NetBSD in some of them in place of NT.

I got the latest distribution (Saturday's), and I've dd'ed it to a 1 Gb
SCSI disk.  I've even mounted it (read-only) on a machine which
understands UFS filesystems.

Now I've got to teach the ARC BIOS how to start off of this disk.
I've got no idea how to do this.  All of the environment variables in
the ARC BIOS were set using a 'magic Windows/NT installation mantra'.

Is there ANY hope of setting up a set of ARC BIOS environment variables
to get NetBSD to boot?  I've read all of the docs/READMEs that come with
the NetBSD-alpha distribution, and they do not mention this setup (except
to gloss over it- "it is assumed that you are familiar with setting up
Alphas...").

It would be a very big win here if we could get this going...


-Mark Taylor
mtaylor@cybernet.com