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Multias




I forgot, here is part of my friends "war story"

Well, I got my multia, and after several hours of ingenius reverse
enginering I manged to start installing NT.  I only had a copy of
workstation with me at the store, so I aborted until I  get home and can
put server on.  Here's what I had to do: Install a pair of 72 pin parity
simms(total of 64mbs at $90),32X CD ROM($80,but cheaper ones can be
had),and a 500MB 3.5" SCSI HD ($30).  How did I get a full size HD and CD

to work when my multia did not come with an external SCSI port you ask?
Well, it came with an internal SCSI adapter(50 pin),but the cable
conector
is surface mounted to the planar board and only had one connector.  So, I

yanked the cable out of the pins and clamped on a 7 headed SCSI
cable($20)and snaked the cable out the back.  I then used a standard
power
supply($15)to power the drives.


Here is where it get's tricky...

Well, I'm writing this message to you on my multia.  I brought it home
and
got NT server working after a brief period of frustration figuring out
how
to format the drive.  I thought I could just hook it up to my SCSI
adapter
in my celeron box and format it, but NT setup on the alpha kept saying
there were no valid partitions and that I needed to run a program on the
NT disk called ARCINST to format the drive.  I didn't know the syntax for

starting programs from specific locations at the command line that's part

of the multia's firmware, so I went on line and stumbled across some
directions.

Getting it talking to my network was no big woop since I'm using DHCP,
but
there isn't an Alpha version of the client software I use for my linux
router, so I downloaded a program from Digital called fX!32 that allows
x86 apps to run on the Alpha platform, and it seems to be working nicely.




This will make much more sence to some of you then it did to me I'm sure.

Just thought I'd pass it along....
RS