Well, here is the update.

>    I was able to do an install using 3.0.2 (3.0.1
> has been superceeded
> by 3.0.2) and had no trouble doing the install to
> ld0.
> 
>    Did your system hang trying to creat the
> filesystem, or did it error
> out?

It errored out while writing the file system to the
RAID 5 array.

I tried the 3.1 install. Going through sysinst and
from the shell prompt with "newfs dev/rld0a" had the
same result. Both hung with an I/O error report. The
block where the I/O report occurred changed each time.

>    Something you can try with your current install
> media is to either exit
> out of the first sysinst menu, or select the utils
> menus and then the
> shell menu.  Once you are at the shell prompt, try:
> 
> # newfs /dev/rld0a
> 
>    That should be doing the same thing sysinst was
> trying to do.
> 
>    If that hangs or aborts, try the following:
> 
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rld0a bs=64k count=100
> 
>    If it complains about a read-only filesystem,
> then do:
> 
> # disklabel -W ld0
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rld0a bs=64k count=100
> 
>    If that completes normally, you can try the dd
> command again with
> a larger count value (or leave the count= completely
> off to zero the 
> entire partition).  Then try the newfs command again
> and see if it
> completes normally.

I did try the above command to zero out the RAID 5
array as well, but it reported an I/O error as well.

I/O errors indicate a bad hard drive don't they? What
would be the chances of all 3 hard drives being bad at
the same time in this RAID 5 array?

Would there be a way to test the SCSI drives
individually in this RAID 5 array?

It was mentioned earlier that I could remove the RAID
5 set up by simply running a ??JOBD?? program. How
would I go about doing that from the SRM on this
Digital 5305?

Any other suggestions? I'm beginning to wonder if this
is a lost cause to get this Alpha running. It seemed
so simple doing my install on i386 of NetBSD, went
just as the NetBSD Guide has said.

The server seems to be in excellent shape. The
interior is super clean, it has 576mb of ram, and the
533mhz Alpha chip. It would be more than enough to run
the intranet and be a file server that I wanted for my
8 machine network.

Steve
mowestusa@yahoo.com



 
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