Hey folks, apologies if this is better suited for the main IRIX thread, but I am a beginner and I feel like the answer here is probably a misunderstanding on my part, so this felt the thread to post in.
I recently got my hands on an Indy (badged as an R5000 machine but it seems to have an R4600 - there's some other pretty clear evidence this thing has had some parts moved around by a previous owner) that I'm trying to get cleaned up and usable. It
did come with a hard drive, and with the drive installed the machine will boot to the multi-user login screen. I do not know any credentials, including the root creds to try and boot into single-user mode, and I suspect the person I bought this from has no clue either. I've got some context clues as to where this machine was last used in any contemporary sense, and I'm betting the person I bought the machine from found it several yard/estate/liquidation sales removed.
I bought a ZuluSCSI v6.4 (Not a "base" ZuluSCSI or RP2040 variant, this seems to be the successor to the SCSI2SD v6 - no DIP switches, configured via a utility) that I would like to get working with the machine, and am using
LOVE to handle installation over my network.
What works:
- LOVE is running on another machine on my network just fine
- I can boot the Indy into the PROM command monitor (had to remove the password jumper)
- With my current ZuluSCSI configuration (which may be suspect), the output of `hinv` shows one SCSI device at scsi(0)disk(1)
- The ZuluSCSI configuration has the drive at SCSI id 1, start sector 0, enough sectors to show as 4GiB (4GiB/512Bytes)
- I've set the ZuluSCSI to SCSI 2, and enabled Parity
- I have no other devices enabled
- I have no hardware SCSI devices connected
- I'm able to launch `fx` to attempt to format the drive to prepare for an installation
- `fx` starts and reports that the volume header is not valid - this makes sense, there's nothing on the drive yet
- If I check the results of the partition table generated by default, I see that it seems to detect the correct number of blocks as configured earlier for the ZuluSCSI
At this point, though, I'm stuck. If I try to format the drive using the `[a]uto` option, I get a bunch of errors as output, notably "fx/auto: Warning: can't write volume header on disk", and "fx/auto: Warning: can't write sgilabel"
I've done as much googling and searching of these forums as I can stand, and have come across a really frustrating array of results. I see things saying "ZuluSCSI is plug and play", as well as "ZuluSCSI is not plug and play", I've quickly realized that a lot of the results on this and other forums are for the "base" version of the ZuluSCSI card, and suggest I need to create files on the SD card to represent my disk images. However, my understanding of the ZuluSCSI v6.4 card is that it is writing data at a lower level to the SD card. Searching for stuff around the older SCSI2SD cards does result in some indication that i need to "partition" the SD card, but I don't see how that helps me here. `fx` is
trying to partition the card and seems to get the fake drive dimensions correct, at least in regards to number of sectors.
I have tried (just for the sake of trying) to partition the SD card on another system using fdisk and creating a new SGI table, matching the sector layout to what ZuluSCSI expects. This does get rid of the volume header warning when starting fx (not when trying to run the auto format) - but again, this makes sense - I put it there myself so of course this time it finds one. However, if I try and start installing software at this point, I get errors about missing swap partitions because fdisk only creates the volhdr and volume partitions. So if I go
back to `fx` to try and stick partitions in there using `[r]epartition`, I yet again get my errors about writing the header/sgilabel.
Whatever, at this point `fx` is not my friend. I take the SD card, go back to fdisk, duplicate the default table that `fx` creates using fdisk, write the table to my SD card, boot the machine back up, try and start installing software, and at this point I already pretty much knew what it was going to say in the back of my mind:
Code:
Write error 21: read only filesystem
I've tried a couple SD cards to try and rule that out (I've also triple checked the silly little lock slider on the full-size SD cards), and the results are consistent on each. Am I missing some obvious step of this process? I'm clearly able to write to the SD card directly on other machines, given that `fdisk` was able to partition the card even though `fx` was not. Could there be a problem with my ZuluSCSI card? Has anyone had any luck installing IRIX onto a ZuluSCSI v6.4 (or even SCSI2SD v6 - they seem to be largely compatible)?
