[CLUE-Tech] Alpha bios info.

[Dave Anselmi]

Here's what I've found about flashing the AS255's bios.  Not that it's
helped much.

There are 2 bios consoles for the alpha, SRM and ARC/Alphabios.  The
first understands BSD disklables and the second understands DOS
partition tables.  They are for booting to Digital Unix or NT,
respectively.  Some alphas have both in their bios, but the 255 can only
hold one.  Milo works with both, aboot only works with SRM.

At the advice of the debian install guide (for woody), I decided to
upgrade the bios.  We likely have a recent rev - Alphabios 5.68 is the
latest out.  Debian also suggests using SRM, since milo may not be
available in a recent form.

I've made the update floppy and run it.  I've made a bootable version of
the same floppy and run that.  Both work to get me to a screen with 3
menu options, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do anything at that
point.  All the mail I've read says I should be able to upgrade the bios
and pick SRM or Alphabios.

Interestingly, you can boot from either bios console to several boot
devices, though SRM seems more flexible.  So I don't really need to
change the bios.  The switch inside (S2) that says 'boot from floppy'
means skip the bios console and boot from the floppy.  So if you mess up
the bios, you can still run the update program to fix it.

If anyone has any ideas how to get this update program to work, I'd be
happy to hear...

Here are some links:

http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/Alpha/firmware/readmes/astn255.html -
this is where you get the latest bios update, as255_v8_1.exe.  There's
only one file but there are different ways to run it.  For Alphabios,
put it on a FAT floppy as fwupdate.exe and run it from the bios menu.

http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/Alpha/firmware/readmes/utilities/mkboot.txt
- this tells you about the mkboot program, that you can use to put the
above update file on an alpha bootable disk (from DOS/Win).  The update
file has to be renamed to fit 8.3 or the program won't recognize it.
Actually it makes any program bootable, so it might be useful with a
kernel too.

http://www.uni-koeln.de/RRZK/systeme/dec/DEC-MANAGERS/1997/Januar-html/msg00041.html
- this is the best summary I found of the issues.

Dave