by Ah! Someone with the same problem I had!
Your problem is that you weren't supposed to use Disk Druid at all. Never mind
the fact that it's sitting there as a valid option in the install scripts; it
lays out the partition table in a way the BIOS (in my case, the AlphaBIOS) can't
read or grok. You're lucky it got to the point where it told you you have a bad
partition block - AlphaBIOS just refuses to talk to the drive in that state, and
requires a
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
to reset it, destroying the world.
BTW, if you have a MILO floppy built, you can boot off of that, and *it* can
read the Druid partitions just fine. Or boot MILO from the CD you burned.
Rebuild your partitions with FDISK and be a happy man - either attempt to put
them where the last partitions were (might work), or reinstall afterwards. You
have the excuse of not having the documentation. I did not, and simply not
having read the documentation very carefully (which is what I did) doesn't
garner nearly as much sympathy. The Red Hat Alpha Addendum Installation Guide
was the reason I forked over the $40 for the Alpha disk set. It's not completely
useless.
Hope this is helpful,
Bill
> Well, I have some Alpha PC164LX systems, and I need to run Linux on one of
> them since we'll have a contract that requires us to deliver alpha-linux
> executables. All these machines have until date ran *BSD.
> So, I downloaded ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/redhat-6.0/alpha. After a
> lot of guesswork, reading of the scattered Linux documentation, and trial
> and error, I finally tried making floppies from generic.img and ramdisk.img,
> and booting these on the system.
> >>> boot dva0
> ...
> I then answer lots of questions, and run into my first problems.
> 1) There is a BSD label on the disk. The "Disk Druid" notices that, and
> just refuses to cooperate. There is no option to overwrite the existing
> label. Trial and horror again. Finally I write a DOS label and get
> somewhat further. The install program hangs and after a hard reset, I
> try the Disk Druid again. It now looks a bit better, but not good.
> 2) Disk Druid is funny. The hdaN numbers keep changing randomly for
> partitions just defined as more partitions are defined! First / was
> hda5, but when I define /var, it (/ that is), is re-mapped to hda6! And
> then the installer says it cannot reread the partition information and
> that it needs to reboot. Well, I wait for perhaps 15 minutes, but the
> reboot hangs (after having printed "Restarting system"). Well, hard
> reset should do it. I restart the install. And now the partitions are
> not at all like the ones I defined! (Note that the system failed to
> reread the partition information, whcih to me sounds like the information
> had been written to disk!)
> 3) Finally, after some more fighting with Disk Druid, I realize that Disk
> Druid just plain does not work for this platform. I try Fdisk instead,
> and although it has a crude user interface, it works much better. Here,
> you can actually make partitions, and they really end up on the disk.
> Progress!
> 4) I define 4 partitions
> hda1 / 50M
> hda2 swap 256M
> hda3 /var 100M
> hda4 /usr 1800M
> Now the install looks more promising... But then the installer says that
> there will be 10M too little on /. I use the "Back" feature of the
> installer in order to make the installation smaller. Great feature, that
> "Back" option! Well, if it had worked... When I resume installation, I
> get an error message from "mount". Presumably the installer never
> unmounts the partitions, and then tries to remount them. There is no way
> to get out of this, except for a hard reset.
> 5) Restart for the nth time from scratch. Boy how fun this is. This time,
> the installation seems to proceed to completion. At least the installer
> says it is complete, and that the system is ready. It is helpful enough
> to reboot the system for me! But that, you guessed it, doesn't work this
> time either! Hard reset after a looooong wait. OK, but now I have Linux
> on the harddrive, right? I just need to type "boot dqa0" to SRM. Right?
> Well, SRM claims the disk doesn't have a valid boot block. I redo the
> install several times, changing various things every time. But the
> result is always the same, but I keep finding more glitches in the
> install system, too numerous to describe here.
> I am without words. I have installed *nix many times on many different
> systems. I have even installed some MS excuses-of-an-operating-system. I
> have never before really failed with an installation. And I did RTFM, if
> you can call the scattered Linux documentation a manual.
> Some of the installation documentation clearly assumes you have Linux
> running on the system already. Check out
> http://www.alphalinux.org/faq/srm-3.html for example. Section 3.5 is
> "Building the Linux Kernel", done before you boot the system in section
> 3.6... And try making a bootable CD w/o a alpha-linux machine running, back
> in section 3.1!
> I will probably be flamed to death for complaining about Linux in public,
> since many kids seem to be very impressed with it. My aim is not to
> complain; I want Linux to run on this system, and I am baffled the install
> is as broken as it is, and I am baffled about the lack of structured install
> instructions. I don't want to tinker for days with the install.
> Alpha-linux users! How did you get Linux onto your SRM machine?
> --
> Torbj?rn