> This is pure speculation, but I noticed that the new Personal
> Workstation 500au & 433au are listed as shipping with an ATAPI CD-ROM
> drive (http://www.workstation.digital.com/products/auseries/auspec.html)
> >From this I assume that these machines might be able to use that
> CD-ROM as boot device with the SRM console.

Note that:

http://www.workstation.digital.com/products/auseries/auspec.html

(The au-Series Technical Specifications page) says:

Disk controller                 Q-Logic Ultra Wide SCSI, EIDE 
                                integrated on MLB (for CD-ROM only)

So, it sounds like the _only_ thing hanging off the IDE controller
that you can boot from is an ATAPI CD-ROM.  That's not surprising;
normal IDE and ATAPI are ... very different, and from what I
understand ATAPI disks are rare (though at least in some cases
becoming more common).


chris