On Sat, 4 Nov 2006, mowestusa wrote:

> When I confirmed that I wanted it to write the
> disklabel it started but failed after "32".

   I don't understand what you mean by it failing after "32".  I can't 
remember the details of this part of the install, and can't place what it 
might be doing at this point.

> I'm assuming that this has to do with the install
> program not seeing the disks correctly. So my question
> is, how to I install to the hard disk on a system like
> this? I believe it is set up as a RAID 5 array from
> the "show device" command in SRM. I really don't
> understand what that means because I have never had or
> used a RAID controler. Is there a way for it to see
> all of the drive individually?

   It sounds to me like you probably have a Mylex (DAC960) raid controller
common in the older alphas.  These are supported by NetBSD, except that
the drives won't be detected as the boot device and you either have to
hardwire the root drive in the kernel configuration, or enter to root
partition on boot each time.  There's an open PR on the problem, with an
incorrect patch (I need to get back to looking at that some day).  Other 
than that, the logical drive should work just fine.

   If it is the Mylex controller, you will need the stand-alone raid
configuration utility to modify the configuration.  As mentioned 
previoiusly, the drives can be configured as single "JBOD" logical
drives.  They will still show up as 'ld' drives, so shouldn't make any 
difference in the install (it should make no difference if the logical
drive is a raid drive or if it's a JBOD drive).

   One other option is to replace the Mylex card with a plain SCSI adapter 
and connect the drive shelf to it, but this requires an adapter that SRM 
recgonizes and can boot from - which limits your choices.  There's an 
internal SCSI adapter, but I think it's a narrow bus, and I suspect your 
drive shelf is wide.

--
Michael L. Hitch			mhitch@montana.edu
Computer Consultant
Information Technology Center
Montana State University	Bozeman, MT	USA