The situation was this. I had a PICMG 21064 system which was running
Windows NT. I wanted it to run Unix (Digital/Tru64).
Problem: This box can only contain one type of firmware at a time.
NT uses AlphaBIOS, Unix uses SRM. On some boxes if AlphaBIOS is running,
you can F2 to go to setup, then go to CMOS setup, and F6 for advanced
setup and choose a console type. Not this one. As I said, there is
only room for one at a time. So you must change the firmware.
Thanks to some help from Compaq I finally found this process which
worked for me.
1) Put the firmware CDROM into a PC (in my case running Win 98) and
copy, to a blank floppy, the Fwupdate.exe file from the folder
DMCC21064A.
2) Bring the Alpha system up to the setup screen and run the setup
menu using F2. Select Upgrade AlphaBIOS, and you should see the
floppy being accessed for a while.
If you are lucky you will get a >>> prompt, which is NOT the SRM
console prompt, but the fwupdate prompt. The update program will
then tell you how to update the firmware. You can choose which
console to load.
If you are unlucky, as I was, the whole machine will lock up and
you will need to do a power cycle to get it back.
Fortunately the kind soul at Compaq warned me that sometimes the
VGA card will cause this exact kind of lockup.
We poked around and found a different PCI VGA card, replaced the
PBXGB card which came with the box, tried it again, and it worked as
advertised. The >>> prompt came up, I reloaded with the new firmware
and now I've got the SRM prompt.
Once the firware was changed, I put the old VGA card back into the
machine and it works fine. There's just *something* about the
firmware update program that causes this problem.
FWIW, I tried running the fwupdate program directly from the CDROM
using the run utility program option under AlphaBIOS setup. That
did not work at all. It complained that the image file was bad.
Good luck.....
--
This message from, Encore Real Time Computing, Inc.
Burch Seymour 1700 NW 66th Ave. Suite 103
Senior Software Engineer Fort Lauderdale, Fl 33313
email: bseymour_at_encore.com Vox: (954)377-1128 Fax: (954)377-1140
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Received on Thu May 13 1999 - 19:20:46 NZST