After trying unsuccesfully to trade it to a friend a few months ago, yesterday I decided to fire up my AlphaServer 2100. It’s not a high-spec machine, with only a single 190Mhz EV4 CPU (the other CPU board failed a few months ago), 512MiB RAM and half a dozen 2GiB drives on a DAC960, but I thought it would be nice to at least get NetBSD installed on it.

I dug out a known-working NetBSD/alpha 3.0 CD and after a bit of fiddling, got the bootloader to load and uncompress the kernel. After decompressing, the machine appeared to hang. After waiting a few minutes, I hit the reset button, at which point things took a turn for the worse… The LCD status panel stopped displaying anything and the monitor connected to the VGA display remained blank. The fans were spinning, the disks had spun up and the network card LED was lit. I power-cycled the machine – same result. After reseating all the cards and even running the machine open for a brief period to look for status LEDs inside (didn’t spot any), I decided to hit Google.

I seems as if a few people have had the same problem, most notably Zoon PHAM (see this mail to Tru64 UNIX Managers), but no-one seems to have any possible solutions. This is rather disappointing – this is the only Alpha I own (although I currently have an AlphaServer 800 on loan, a machine that has rekindled my interest in Alphas), and they’re not particularly easy to come by here in South Africa.