PWS500a (Mitia) first install

[Ulrich]

Thanks, David and Sten. 

Sten Spans writes: 

> On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, David O'Brien wrote: 
> 
>> I would buy a Qlogic 1040 or LSI 'sym(4)' card cheep on eBay.  The IDE
>> conroller in the PWS500a is simply a POS.
> 
> Adaptec 2940uw is bootable with certain srm versions,
> Symbios 895's are a good choise too. 
> 
> Please note that boot support has nothing to do with
> freebsd. SRM has to support the particular adaptor. 
> 
> if the box came with 2940 booting from it may just work ..

The box is capable of booting Windows/NT 3.51 from one of the two 2 GB disks 
attached to the Adaptec. 

AlphaBIOS Version: 5.29 970226.1314 

I already downloaded the files from the HP site with the current version. I 
hesitate a little bit to perform the upgrade because I never did that and I 
know that it may damage the system if something goes wrong. 

I'm gonne buy a high capacity 2,5 " SCSI disk to replace the two 2 GB disks. 
If the system can boot from it - perfect! If not, I'll use the CDROM or the 
floppy disks to boot from. 

I'm eager to get the box up and running now since it is here for about 4 
months. 

Thanks for the advice!