Here are some common problems that people have seen, together with the solutions.
Reading MS-DOS floppies from the Evaluation Board Debug Monitor.
Several people reported having problems reading
files from the floppy disk using the Evaluation Board Debug Monitor
supplied with Digital Alpha Evaluation Boards such as the AlphaPC64.
Usually, the Debug Monitor can load the first few sectors all right,
but then goes into an endless loop complaining about "bad sectors."
Apparently, there is an incompatibility between the DOS file system as
expected by the Debug Monitor and the Linux implementation of DOSFS.
To make the long story short: if you run into this problem, try either
using the mtools or DOS to write the floppy disk. For example,
if loading the file milo.cab doesn't work, then you can use
the Linux command mcopy to write the image. E.g.:
mcopy milo.cab a:
Or, if you use a DOS machine, insert the floppy that contains the
unreadable image milo.cab and then do:
copy a:milo.cab c:
copy c:milo.cab a:
del c:milo.cab
Then try booting from that floppy again. This normally solves the problem.
Milo displays a long sequence of O> and does not accept input.
This usually happens when Milo was built to use COM1 as a secondary console device. In such a case, Milo echo output to COM1 and accepts input from there also. This is great for debugging but not so great if you have a device other than a terminal connected. If this happens, disconnect the device or power it down until the Linux kernel has booted. Once Linux is up and running, everything will work as expected.
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