I recently upgraded my alpha from some ancient (1.6ZF, IIRC) version
to -current. After everything was fine, I wanted to upgrade the bootstrap,
just for completeness.

I looked at the installboot man page and did not find an example for
alpha, so I came up with this:

 cp /usr/mdec/boot /
 installboot -v /dev/rsd0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffs /boot

But:

File system:         /dev/rsd0a
File system type:    ffs (blocksize 8192, needswap 0)
Primary bootstrap:   /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffs
Secondary bootstrap: /boot
Bootstrap start sector:  1
Bootstrap sector count:  13
New boot block checksum: 0xf11cb683f1b4be6f
Writing bootstrap
Writing boot block
installboot: Writing `/dev/rsd0a': Read-only file system
installboot: Set bootstrap operation failed

I then rebooted, and apparently the new bootstrap (both primary and secondary)
has been installed, and they worked fine.

So, did I do something wrong, or is this just a bogus error message from
installboot?

Martin