Hello, I'm reposting a revised version of my lost post from last Saturday:
Hi Steven,
After firmware upgrade openvms 8.3 now boots on pws433au.
Since I had problems booting from cd-rom (this was before I replaced the ide cd-r/w drive by a scsi cd-rom drive), for the fw-upgrade I prepared a floppy for the srm, arc, srom update and a 2nd one for the pci-controller update.
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/alphaserver/firmware/retired_platforms/workstations/digital_pers_wrksta/digitalpw_v72_fw_relnote.pdf shows how to do this for Windows NT, Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS, and DOS/Windows Users.
The DOS/Windows ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/alphaserver/firmware/other/utility/makeboot.exe utility (which is a combination of mkboot.c of rawrite.c by Mark Becker and mkbootfirm.c by Kevin Mocklin (DEC)) is a 16 bit program and doesn't run in win [win10pro64] (which runs in virtualbox under linux on my pc), because it is not compatible with 64 bit win. Since I don't have WNT, Tru64 nor openvms, I created a floppy disk image ($ head -c 1474560 /dev/zero > myimage.vfd), formatted it under win (can also be done with linux $ fdisk myimage.vfd (n ...(default) t ... (type) 6 (FAT16); $ mkfs.fat myimage.vfd), and then used dosbox under linux to mount the FD image with imgmount.
Note, that the FD image must be formatted otherwise it won't mount and there is no format program in dosbox.
Then I copied the firmware ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/alphaserver/firmware/retired_platforms/workstations/digital_pers_wrksta/digitalpw_v72_1.exe (renamed to fwupdate.exe) and mkboot.exe to ~/alphafw
$ dosbox
Z:\> imgmount a -t floppy myimage.vfd
Drive a is mounted as myimage.vfd
Z:\> mount c ~/alphafw
Z:\> c:
C:\> makeboot fwupdate.exe
mkboot V1.1: create a bootable floppy
Please insert a formatted diskette into drive A: and press andy key :
Number of sectors per track for this disk is 18
Writing image to drive A: Press ^C to abord.
Track: 68 Head: 0 Sector: 13
Done.
C:\>
Now I copied myimage.vfd via scp via LAN to the pws433au (alpha) running an old installation of debian linux for alpha* on dka0 (/dev/sda1). [when I got the pws, debian was installed, though it didn't boot since the bios battery was empty which reset it to pws433a. I replaced the battery and changed the bios settings to openvms/SRM console.]
I also copied the openvms 8.3 system disk image from my previous workstation (dec3000) to debian on alpha ($ scp disk00.img root@192.168.178.30:~) and then on debian on alpha to the 2nd scsi disk dka100 ($dd if=disk00.img of=/dev/sdb bs=10M). that the sizes differ, doesn't matter for now, since dka100 is much bigger than my old system disk.
Under debian on alpha I copied the myimage.vfd to a physical floppy with ($fdformat /dev/fd0; dd if=myimage.vfd /dev/fd0; cmp /dev/fd0 myfwupd.vfd) and it turned out that only one of my last 10 spare floppy disks I found in the basement was a good one. I rebooted via SRM from DVA0 and successfully flashed SRM, ARC/AlphaBIOS, and SROM.
Then I did a power cycle and using the procedure shown above I prepared the pci-controller firmware update floppy using
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/alphaserver/firmware/retired_platforms/workstations/digital_pers_wrksta/digitalpw_pci_v7_2.exe
It booted, read the content of the floppy, and then directly rebooted into Debian.
During ($shutdown now -h) the firmware utility "UPD>" came up with the blue screen, looking for fw-update (options) on a ods-2(?) device, which I didn't know what to do about since I had not burned any CD and exited.
By the way, what would be the pci controller name by the way on pws433au: dfxaa_fw, KZPSAA12, kzpsa_fw (these are listed in ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/alphaserver/firmware/retired_platforms/workstations/digital_pers_wrksta/digitalpwfw.sys ).
Back in SRM I set the boot_osflags to 0,0 and booted dka100 and my system disk openvms 8.3 тАФafter asking for date/timeтАФ booted without error (at least as far as I saw, since the display scrolled fast and I've not yet inspected the boot log file.)
Sadly X (@decw$startup) doesn't start since my ATI graphics card is not supported by openvms. now I got stuck with $edit/teco! :) I'll try to find a S3 Trio32/64.
Cheers and thanks to Alfred (ccac) and mihi42 for their help.
erstling
*) Debian supports my ATI rage pro 215GP (rev5c) graphics card. Debian dropped support for alpha since many years. If you want to follow my steps and need a bootable linux on alpha, note, that alpha is still actively supported by gentoo linux: https://www.gentoo.org/downloads/, though the last gentoo alpha liveCD & install http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/Linux/Gentoo/experimental/alpha/livecd/ http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/distfiles.gentoo.org/experimental/alpha/livecd/ http://gentoo.osuosl.org/experimental/alpha/livecd/ is from 2006; it booted into 'aboot' with my scsi cd-rom drive; with aboot parameter 0 it continued boot but lost the access to cd-rom/root; maybe it was made to boot from ide cd-rom drive. this is another topic.
