[rescue] AS4100a questions (and problems booting Debian)

[Peter D. Porter]

I just picked up an AlphaServer 4100a, no disks or media.  I have no prior
experience with Alphas, so it's a new and wonderful land.  It seems to
come up in SRM, in which I can poke around and show devices and whatnot.  
I've attempted to download and boot the latest Debian (from CD and
floppy). However:

It gets past the basics, brings the graphics up (don't have the 
serial console connected, so I don't see what happens before this), looks 
as though it identifies scsi devices, and has a Kernel Panic 
supposedly when mounting the root fs ('you must specify a type when 
mounting a UFS filesystem...').  I get the same behaviour from CD and 
floppy.  Could someone point me in the right direction here?  I've found 
little information that pertains to specific boot problems on the initial 
debian install.

Also, out of curiosity, what is this system comparable to in sun/sgi/intel 
land.  I believe the specs are (roughly):

4 x 5/533 (4MB) processors
4G ram (I think this is the maximum for this machine; odd proprietary 
memory.  what kind of memory is it?)

Would it be worth, at some later point, trying to run Tru64?  Is it hard 
to come by?

Thanks for the help!
Peter


-
Peter Porter
peter at thinkingclearly.com