> by way of adding insult to injury, although i did make it through the boot
> process and into the installation menu, now sysinst can't find the 
> drives.   i assume the default installation kernel doesn't do RAID.

That's a true statement. I'm not even sure that this piece of h/w is supported
in NetBSD. I don't think it's even supported in FreeBSD or Linux yet.

> 
> as i mentioned, i'm new to the Alpha platform.   any suggestions are
> welcome.

Dig up a Qlogic 1040 or a Symbios 53c825 or 53c875. If there's CMD0646 chip
onboard on this puppy (IDE), that might work also (that'd be 'boot dqa')...

-matt