On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 15:45 -0400, Scott Pendergast wrote: > Hi we've recently inherited some ES40's DS20's and a bunch of DS10L Alpha > boxes we'd like to run Centos 4.x on and all goes well until the reboot > following the install. > > I've tried halting at SRM and trying to explicitly boot from the hd but keep > getting errors indicating no valid boot block is found on the target drive. > >From what I've read I suspect it is something to do with aboot, etc. I'm > new to the Alpha, so don't know if the boot track should have to be manually > written to the drive after install, if the installer is supposed to take > care of that for you, etc. I've tried various partitioning schemes, etc and > the aboot.conf changes acordingly so it would appear that the installer is > taking care of aboot but I can't be sure. > > These boxes were previously TRU64 boxes (running fdisk /dev/sda reports a > BSD disklable, etc in case that helps, or hurts, in my case) > > Any insight would be much appreciated! > > Thanks, > > Scott > Dear Scott, & list Pasi's response was much more technically detailed than mine and better in all ways. The RH installer is a little funky for Alpha machines, and as P notes, you don't **ever** want to let it automatically partition your disk. I have avoided trouble by setting up an installation with a separate /boot partition, then either everything else in /, or a combination of / and /usr. Start the /boot partition at cyl 1 - the disk druid front end will let you edit the cylinder range on all your partitions. That way the aboot has a place to live that SRM can find it. later jn