Comment by don-code
7 days ago
I'm thankful for folks who write articles like this. Even if the goal wasn't reached (getting the AlphaStation to boot), having something to show for a negative result still helps if someone else needs to go down a similar road - or, for that matter, needs to know not to go down a particular road.
I likewise wrote a COVID-boredom-induced blog post about my many missteps, and eventual failure, getting AIX to run on an old PC. My "learnings" there were that the installation media (floppies) are _written to_ by the installer, making a reset to a known state rather difficult, and also that support for IDE disks was only made available in a patch.
Presumably AIX 1.3 for PS/2? Unlike some other retro UNIX of that vintage it actually virtualizes easily https://astr0baby.wordpress.com/2018/09/14/running-aix-1-3-i...
Yes! This is actually where I learned about the patched "_0024" images for IDE drives.
Unfortunately, at boot, the drive is recognized but can't be mounted. I suspect it has something to do with the LBA card (Promise EIDEMax) I have in the machine I was trying to install it in, since the machine only supports C/H/S drives out of the box.