I'm trying to boot from a hard drive with controllers that I have
available, which are IDE, Adaptec and NCR 53C825.  I know the adaptec is
not supported, so that's out (though it works fine as a secondary
controller).

There are a lot of problems trying to get 19990122 snapshot running,
including a non-working sysinst program (fouls up mounting of the
specified hard drive before trying to copy stuff to it).  I can manually
work past those problems and get an appropriate filesystem on either a
SCSI (NCR) or IDE boot disk.

In both of those last cases, however, the boot block installation sequence
given in the FAQ, and used in the /install script fail to yield a booting
device:

(from the FAQ:)

    # mount the file system
    mount /dev/sd1a /mnt

    # install the bootstrap programs
    cp /usr/mdec/boot /mnt
    sync
    sync
    ./installboot /mnt/boot /usr/mdec/bootxx /dev/rsd1c


I do the appropriate thing with /dev/rsd1c - /dev/rsd0c or /dev/rwd0c for
me.

In all cases, a followup attempt at booting from the hard disk yields
something like:

device dqa0 is invalid

from the SRM.

I'm running SRM V 4.9 on a bunch of 1GB PC164LX and one PC164.

I'm stuck between a rock and hard place, and really need to get these
things running reliably for a change.  Any reasonable suggestions would be
appreciated.  I realize I may need to just go an buy 10 or so Qlogic
cards.

Thanks in advance,

Paul

+------------------------------------------------------+
| Paul Anderson           Public Data Queries, Inc.    |
| pha@pdq.com             734-213-4964(W) 994-3734(H)  |
+------------------------------------------------------+