  OpenVMS on Personal Workstation? 
 The Question is:
 
We received a personal workstation 433a and 500a with NT on them (the a is
for NT and the au is for OpenVMS).  We would like to install VMS on them but
we are having problems.
 
We tried booting the 6.2 and 7.0 binaries disc on the IDE CD-ROM drive and
it starts jumping to bootstrap code and then fails.  It halts with a halt
code = 5, PC=2000f918.
 
We then realized VMS maybe didn't like the IDE CD-ROM drive since we read
that DIGITAL UNIX doesn't.
 
We then found a SCSI CD-ROM and installed it as device 4 on the SCSI cable.
We then realized the system wasn't seeing the adaptec SCSI card that came
with the computer.
 
We have two older alphastations to work with (233 and a 166) so we ripped
out the SCSI card and hard drives from one of them and installed it in one
of the new machines.
 
We now see all the required devices as we normally do (dka0, dka100,
dka400), and we tried to boot with both the CD and from the hard drive.
 
Again we get:
 
halt code = 5
HALT instruction executed
PC=2000f918
 
One other message we received when we booted setting the default boot device
to dka0 was:
 
no timer interrupts
on CPU 0.
 
Can anybody help?
 
We looked at a lot of the boot variables and tried changing them.  We
compared the boot variables from the older running machines to the newer
ones.  No luck.
 
Are there maybe some problems with trying to install VMS on the a-series
machines?
The newer machines have on-board IDE but we rely on a SCSI card for the
devices.
 
We are going to try updating the firmware.  We are currently running V
6.4-278 Jun 3 1997.
 
 
thanxinadvance
 
Mark Dickhoff
 
 
 The Answer is:
 
  OpenVMS is not supported on the -a series Personal Workstation systems.
 
  OpenVMS is supported on the -au series, starting with OpenVMS Alpha
  V7.1-1H1 and later.  Earlier releases are not supported on this system.
  An ECO kit will be required for IDE CD-ROM support.
 
  The OpenVMS Wizard strongly recommends using OpenVMS Alpha V7.1-2 or
  later, rather than V7.1-1H1 or V7.1-1H2.
 
