[ attempted 4mm tape boot on a 3000, well, this should be good :-) ]

> what do i need to do to get this to work?

First, you should probably tell us exactly how you made the tape.

The install doc gives two totally different sets of tape-making instructions.
One elementary tar command example in the indep section and then some
different and very alpha-specific instructions later.

Also, should you get it to boot, it's going to be interesting to see if
sysinst can be tricked into reading a tape. Perhaps you could ^z and read
the tape into the local filesystem.

The 3000's use "old SRM" and it has a couple of serious bugs in tape
handling, but last time I tried it I had worked around all of them.

    --Ross
    (fingers crossed)