[capmilk]

Hello there,

after about 20 years of not touching an SGI, fate has decided to once again spark my interest by giving me an Onyx. Impossible to resist. And of course, the troubles started right away...

I was able to boot the long neglected machine exactly once. It complained that there was no drive at the expected SCSI id and dropped me into the maintenance menu. So I looked at the hinv, found the ids of two existing drives and tried to see if any of them had an OS installed on it. Tried to figure out the boot command from memory. I guess you all know where this is headed.
After trying a few combinations of busses, ids, sashes and fxs, I finally managed to type something the box really did not like, ran into an illegal magic number exception and the system asked for the input of any key to reboot. Ever since that reboot, I have not seen any GUI, because the boot arbitration procedure does not complete anymore. Result is always "boot is incomplete, fault is no master". At least that is what the LCD tells me.

This, of course, is where I need your help. Can you tell me what's wrong here and how to fix it? Did my CPU board survive one startup and chose to fry itself when it saw my sad attempts of getting the system to boot?

Any help would be appreciated. I'll let the system cool down for a while and will try again, but I fear the worst.