[weblacky]

L1 has two firmware blocks to help prevent bricking, we've never seen one "fail". As Raion is hinting, there is an upgrade order to L1 (due to the fashing utility firmware format).  Older firmware is flashed with older version of flash utility, new with newer, newest with newest (stupid I know).  So based on the version you are "at" you have to run an OS version sequence to flash up to the latest...once at latest you can run ANY Irix version supported by the system, (they don't care if you run new firmware on older OS releases).

I'm being selfish here...but if you HAVE ENV disease, please hold off for a moment as I'm trying to spin up a side hustle doing this work myself.  A shop is going to charge you a HUGE amount of money...do it poorly, (melt surrounding items) have no respect for what it is, and basically cook your board with hot air (which I don't use) trying to remove the chip like they'd remove a Nintendo Switch charging port.  As a community, I'm hoping we can offer these kinds of services fairly soon (be patient).  But they'd likely give it to the  "new guy" as easy...he'd likely blacken the board trying to remove the chip.  I have the tools to remove the chip without hot air and I don't use hot air at all on most things (not needed, too risky) that have legs.  I have used hot air to "finish" the small soldering job to pull in solder between legs...but that's lower than removal temps/duration.

These kind of concerns are being addressed, it just takes some time.

I'd say if you're worried, and want to run the system(s) now and not wait, buy the ATX PSU adapter and a compatible ATX PSU) and run the systems.  If you find you have ENV disease, it needs to isolated which component regions it is (3 ICs on mainboard, 1 on CPU PIMM, 1 on Graphics card...I don't know the location of the graphics card ENV IC at this time).  Normally you get a hint by the numbers or errors on which of the regions it is.

In terms of the original FUEL PSUs, I'm hoping to have rebuilt models in less than 1 year.  I've done SGI Indy and have done one Tezro (and have two more Tezro PSUs to do first), then I'm heading to FUEL (Fuel has 4 possible PSUs, but I only have one version, the others would require extended time to research and rebuild).

Things are moving but a new PSU isn't going to cause ENV disease, so I'd just go that way.  If ENV disease does happen...don't panic...it's fixable!  


We're here and this is known stuff...your not at the forefront of SGI failure on these :-)