I went the route of sysinst from a burned iso image of the 1.6 Release.  I'm
installing on a DEC AlphaStation 255.  My goal is to move my 1.5.3 system 
(kernel and userland) to the 1.6 Release.

Things seemed to go well.  I'm following the guidlines given in the "upgrading" 
section of the INSTALL.htm file.  I installed the kern and base binary sets.  Upon
completion of the sysinst update program, I dropped into single-user mode 
and attempted to pull in the etc.tgz to a /tmp/upgrade directory.

mkdir /tmp/upgrade
cd /tmp/upgrade
pax -zrpe -f /path/to/etc.tgz

The pax command responds as follows:

ATTENTION! pax archive volume change required.
Ready for archive volume: 1
Input archive name or "." to quit pax.
Archive name >

What is pax looking for?

A little googling indicated that there may be a problem with the archive.
However, I can read it from my Linux box, and I can extract all the files 
using tar.
-- 
Allons Rouler!
        
Randy
http://www.arabie.org/