My apologies in advance if this is not the correct forum for this
question, but I haven't found help anywhere else.
I have an AlphaStation 200 4/233, 32 megs RAM. It came (supposedly)
unused, but without a hard drive, operating system, or cd drive. I
have been attempting to install DEC Unix 3.2C, which is supposedly
compatible with the hardware and the firmware. I added two hard drives:
one is only 500 megs, but the other is a gig or so, and should have plenty
of room for the installation, I'm told. I put a cd drive in (it's a Teac
cd burner, the only thing I had lying around with the correct block size),
and it hasn't given me any problems (or at least I don't think it has).
So... I put in both drives, and the firmware sees them. The 3.2
installation program only sees the one in the first slot, no matter which
drive happens to be there. Attempting installation on either drive gives
me the same error message (which is most likely the root of all of this
trouble).
I choose 1 for "Basic Installation" and it starts reading the cd. It then
asks me to choose the installation disk, and gives me one choice, so i
press "1." It immediately gives me this error message:
trap: invalid memory read access from kernel mode
It then shows the address of the fault and exits to the firmware, and I'm
back where I started.
The same thing happens when I choose "Advanced Installation," so I tried
"System Management," copied the contents of the CD to the larger hard
drive, tried to boot from that, and got nowhere. I also tried to manually
start osf_boot from the cd, which made it say "Memory fault" and return me
to the system management prompt.
After calling the DEC reseller in Arizona where this box came from, and at
their suggestion, I had DEC's part source replace the memory. I traded
them four 8-meg simms for two 16-meg simms. Nothing changed.
My questions:
Exactly what does the error message mean?
Since the simms themselves don't seem to be the problem, could it be the
slots? Could the motherboard itself be faulty (which might explain the
hard drive problem)?
Could it be a problem with 3.2C itself? Should I try to downgrade the
firmware to the minimum version required to run 3.2C?
I have yet to try another operating system, since I don't have another
Alpha-compatible OS readily available.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
- gothy
gothy_at_taz.hutch.org
Received on Sat Mar 20 1999 - 02:26:01 NZDT