[weblacky]

The L1 dallas holds a COPY of the serial number (not the primary source anyway, the small socketed ATMEL chip on the board has the serial...otherwise the system could never auto-configure a blank chip), while I don't think anyone has publicly tried it, if you could place ANY DALLAS DS1220 compatible RTC of the right density in these machines and they worked...that would be great, but there must be a reason we don't, right?

But the L1 RTC stores ALL NVRAM settings and I assume that means the logs, hw inventory, and hardware IO setup registers settings, etc. It doesn't just hold a serial number, is holds all the same info as a PC BIOS config would need to (including whatever the MIPS uses instead instead of ACPI tables).

Also, I don't trust the Irix and CDROM diags. Power-on diags are good enough for most things but I've never seen a machine pass those darn thing without some kind of freezing a test (one or the other), the onsite IDE never worked well whenever I tried it...