[windows95se]

I have two O2’s: a 1996 O2 and a 2000 O2. I connected them both over serial and both on the same port number with a null modem cable because one of them (the 2000 O2) needed resetting but because it has the flat panel adapter installed, it would only show a black screen. I was attempting to reset over serial like others had done. I plugged the 2000 O2 into my 1996 O2 to reset in the console (my 1996 O2 ran perfectly fine with IRIX 6.5.30). However, my 1996 O2 froze forcing me to restart it. When I restarted it, the 1996 O2 wouldn’t boot into IRIX, instead loading this message:

Cannot load /sash. 
No default device and path in environment. 
Unable to execute /sash: invalid argument
Unable to load bootfile: invalid argument 
Unable to boot; press any key to continue: 

When I press enter, the screen glitches which it has never done before. I’ve read in places that there’s a thing called ‘serial mode’, which is what I thought it was in but when I try to access drives in the command monitor, it outputs ‘Resetting SCSI bus; Restarting sequencer’ 4 times before outputting ‘dks0d1s0: volume header not valid; dksc(0,1,0): not a directory’. It also won’t let me access the CD drive in the menus or in the command monitor, only letting me access remote tape drives and remote CD drives. Is it possible that the SCSI is dead or is it just in a different setting? Thanks.

[weblacky]

Well it's pretty easy to check, assuming things worked before. Just power down the system and slide out the booting hard drive sled.

Power the system back on, any problems seeing the CDROM and such? No, then you're disk is dead (based on SCSI resets and volume header errors). Not too hard to believe it could happen.

I highly doubt your SCSI controller is damaged, in parallel SCSI if a single drive on the chain has an issue...the entire bus has an issue often enough.

[windows95se]

Well it's pretty easy to check, assuming things worked before.  Just power down the system and slide out the booting hard drive sled.

Power the system back on, any problems seeing the CDROM and such?  No, then you're disk is dead (based on SCSI resets and volume header errors).  Not too hard to believe it could happen.

I highly doubt your SCSI controller is damaged, in parallel SCSI if a single drive on the chain has an issue...the entire bus has an issue often enough.

While I didn’t find out what the issue was, I can now rule out that it was a SCSI controller issue.

After taking the motherboard out, I noticed it looked rather dusty. I brushed the dust off, reseated the RAM, and shorted the jumpers near the Dallas RTC for 10 seconds. After putting the motherboard back in and restarting the machine, it booted perfectly into IRIX and detected all of my drives.