I asked about this problem a while back:
I have an Alphastation 200 4/233 with 32 megs of memory. It came to me
new, but without a hard drive/OS/CD-ROM drive. I have a copy of DEC UNIX
3.2C and attempted to install it on a 1GB SCSI drive, using the original
CDs. The installation program asks me to choose a hard drive from the
list.
(One peculiar thing to note: when I first started playing with this
box, I had two hard drives in it, and only the one in the first slot would
show up in the list, no matter which drive was in that slot.)
I choose 1, since it's the only one that shows up, and I immediately get
this error message:
trap: invalid memory read access from kernel mode
Anyone know what this means?
When I first asked about this, Bryan Lavelle was kind enough to respond,
and suggested that the problem stemmed from the use of a non-DEC CD-ROM
drive. This is what every Digital employee I've spoken to has told me :)
so I just tried again with RRD45, the drive that normally would have
shipped with my machine. The same thing happened.
The other response was from someone who suggested that I run Linux. :) I
bought this machine specifically to run DEC UNIX. I will try other
operating systems before I give up and return the machine, but I'd like to
exhaust all possibilities before that happens.
Some ideas I had/shot down:
The parity on the CD-ROM drive doesn't seem to matter; the error message
remains the same. There aren't any SCSI ID conflicts, either.
I was able to use the 3rd installation option (System Management, I think
it's called) to manually copy files from the CD to the hard drive, but
trying to run osf_boot from the hard drive produces an error message
saying there's a memory fault.
Four eight-meg SIMMS shipped with the machine. Thinking that the memory
might be bad, I swapped it for two new sixteen-meg SIMMS from DEC.
Nothing changed.
The firmware that came with the machine is a later version than the
upgrade CD that came with 3.2C. Could I benefit by downgrading the
firmware to the older version? All of the documentation I've gotten my
hands on so far has said "version x.x or greater," but is this correct?
Could it be that non-DEC hard drives won't function in this machine? One
of the drives is an IBM, and the other is an HP.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I will summarize.
Received on Wed May 12 1999 - 14:27:25 NZST