[kaigan]

Hello and welcome! The Octane feels like the quintessential SGI machine to me - fast, performant, and beautiful. It's always nice to see another one around here!

I can't say I'm an expert on all of your questions, but I'll answer as best as I can and hopefully others can fill in some details:

1 and 2. I'd treat them more or less like you were examining an OSX machine in terms of file locations. While I haven't heard of an SGI machine being used in this way, there were/are tools to mount XFS volumes on OSX. It's possible that the Octane was acting as a sort of server during a transition period for a company to or from SGI gear and both machine types were being used. If you find any particular files of note, some of the folks here who have more experience in 3D modeling, animation, etc. can likely provide more detail.

3. If the drive is failing diagnostics like that, I'd imagine that it's pretty well dead. Drives of this age tend to be a bit of a crap shoot in terms of how well they work. The tried and true recommendation for replacements around here are NOS Seagate Cheetah 15000 RPM 300 GB drives from eBay. They're not that expensive and many were manufactured as late as 2013 and never used. I have quite a few of them and they work very well.

4. I've noticed a bit of this myself on machines with those carriers, including my Octanes, Onyx2, and Origin200. I'd suggest cleaning the rails and sleds with a bit of high-percentage isopropyl alcohol to remove any dust or grime and then wiping a very small amount of white lithium grease on the rails to help things move smoothly. You don't need much of it at all, just a very thin coating.

5. There are a couple of current development efforts that have led to better media playback on IRIX. Mplayer seems to be the tool of choice. Nekoware contains an older version and an updated version of Axatax and Raion's efforts is available here: http://gitea.irixce.org/Raion/neko_mplayer. drmadison also had been working on version 1.4, but I'm not aware of a code repository for it yet.

6. I'm actually not sure on this one and my initial research (read: Googling) isn't indicating a lot. There's a little bit of info here from a method using a Nekoware tool: https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Use_Custom_...nd_on_Irix

Hopefully that's helpful, and hopefully others can fill in some more details. Of course, if you have any other questions, I'll do my best to answer them as well.