New Red Hat 7.2 Alpha install on DEC PWS 600au

[Jim McCarthy]

Hello --

Yesterday I newly installed Red Hat 7.2 Alpha on my DEC PWS 600au
in order to dual-boot between OpenVMS (dka0,dka100) and RH Linux
(dka200,dka300).  I've done this successfully before on another
machine using the same CD-ROMs burned from downloaded ISO images,
but this time I encounter behavior on boot-up I've not seen before:

>>>boot dka200
[...]
setting affinity to the primary CPU
jumping to the bootstrap code
aboot: Linux/Alpha SRM bootloader version 0.9a
aboot: switching to OSF/1 PALcode version 1.22
aboot: booting from device 'SCSI 0 1004 0 2 200 0 0'
aboot: valid disklabel found: 4 partitions.
aboot: loading uncompressed ...
aboot: loading compressed ...

unzip: unknown compression method
Welcome to aboot 0.9
Commands:
 h, ?            Display this message
 q               Halt the system and return to SRM
[...]
 0-9             Boot preconfiguration 0-9 (list with 'l')
aboot>
___________

So my question is what's causing the "unzip: unknown compression"
message in aboot, leading to the interactive prompt ?

Prior to >>>boot dka200, the BIOS and SRM versions reported are:

BIOS Emulation v1.15a

SRM Console V7.2-1
ARC Console 5.70
PALcode:    OpenVMS PALcode V1.20-16
            Tru64 UNIX PALcode V1.22-18
SROM Version V5.90
___________

Also ... later in the Linux boot-up, I notice a "partition check"
message on disks sda & sdb (the pair of OpenVMS disks), which
reports that Linux is "spinning up" these disks.  But in a dual-
boot situation, I think I'd prefer not having these disks spun up
... is there a way to tell Linux *not* to perform its partition
check and spin-up of disks sda,sdb which are not being used ?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

      -- Jim