> For what it's worth, it turned out to be that the SCSI card is
> useless, I installed an EIDE drive and it is now working
> (dqa0).  However, some mention that the disks should show up in
> 'show config' as dka0 would have helped.

Well, I guess the SCSI card is still probed by NetBSD on bootup,
but yes, I can see that it wasn't very useful for booting from.

> I'm attempting to use a Tekram DC-310 (Symbios 53C810AE) and
> "show config" won't even list the controller.  Is there any
> setting which can be changed (when placed in a PC) that will
> make it work?

Did you install the controller in a 64-bit slot?  I also did a
try with a borrowed Tekram controller (together with a pair of
borrowed disks) which turned out to be a 53c860 (fast20 narrow
scsi).  The SRM firmware did only show the controller under "show
config" if it was installed in a 32-bit PCI slot.  Furthermore,
it did print that it didn't recognize the manufacturer/device ID
and provided the numeric values (and of course did not show a
corresponding SRM device name).

I did however also have a similar experience with the Qlogic
ISP1040B card I bought -- "show config" in SRM told me that it
was an "ISP 1020" (it probably grovelled the string out from the
PCI card), but it did not show a corresponding device name in SRM
(a'la dqa0 or whatever it was called) in a line below, as I think
it should if it was fully recognized as supported for booting.

What I ended up with was to buy an EIDE drive and boot from it
(you need it hooked up on the first IDE channel).


While on the subject of bootable device support, we've also found
out that you *can* boot from de500 cards (10/100 cards made by
Digital with the 21140 chip), but in our case we needed to do so
in 10Mbit/s mode by doing "set ewa0_mode 10baseT" in SRM.  My
attempt to net-boot with a Kingston 10/100 card failed (also a
21140-based card, but probably a different PHY which SRM didn't
know how to tweak).  Reputedly "clone" cards with only 10Mbit/s
support should work better for net-booting (21040 based cards).


I guess we've both fallen victim to the fact that the SRM
firmware for the pc164 is in a rather strict "maintenance mode",
and that probably implies that they won't add support for newer
devices as boot devices.  I guess also that that's the reason why
other folks report newer cards being supported on other alpha
hardware which won't work on the pc164 boards.


Regards,

- H=E5vard