SUMMARY: Tru64 on AlphaPC 164 SX

Hello Admin Wizards,

I was surprised by the lots of replies I received on this.
Nice to see that I am not the only dinosaur breeder around.

Special thanks to:

Tim Cutts, Jon Norstog, Dirk Kleinhesselink, Richard Loken, Phil Thomas, 
  John de Conquer, and, as always, SPECIAL THANKS to Tom Blinn.

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Consensus was that one has to get rid of the AlphaBios and install the 
SRM on the machine. There are two ways to do that:

a) turn the machine to failsafe mode (DIP-Block 1, switch 8 to position 
1) while powered off.
b) Switch it on and wait until the beeps are over.
c) AFTER the beeps, insert a floppy containing the fwupdate software 
from 
ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/DEC/Alpha/firmware/readmes/archive/alphapc164sx.html
and wait two minutes, the LFU will appear.
d) After being asked fo a supplementary disk, insert the disk with the 
appropriate SRM image
e) choose "update" as the option you want
f) watch how the update fails.

For some ominous reason this method did not work for me, and I have no 
idea why. So I choose the second option:

a) turn on the machine and hit F2 to enter setup in the AlphaBios
b) choose "Bios Update"
c) insert the disk with the appropriate SRM Image
d) watch the update running
e) reboot - ready.

And that was it!
 From now on Tru64 setup worked almost perfectly.
I have been warned of some issues, however, that might be interesting 
for folks with different hardware: Tru64 may not work with Adaptec SCSI 
Controllers  and video cards other than Oxygen or Elsa Gloria and a DEC 
Ethernet card (i have some of these in stock from my old Alphas).
So I continued installing, and hey, all went fine.

A BIG thank you to all who helped me thinking.
let us keep them alive, the Tru64-machines, they are well worth the effort!

Yours truly
CW