[weblacky]

Sounds like you pretty much saw everything.

Without a working OS there's not terribly much you can do in the firmware. It's meant to be very minimalistic. The terminal window literally only has a few commands if you type help. It's designed to load an operating system. It's not designed to do anything else.

Also the prom can't really tell you what hardware you have with a high specificity. You can type "hinv". At the command terminal in the prom terminal but it's only reading some basic information from the hardware. It can't tell you which graphics card you really have without the operating system system help. It should be able to tell the difference between the two families of graphics card using a code name. Odyssey means it's VPro graphics. The other means it's the previous generation. But you won't know exactly what you have until the Os system loads the drivers!

Also this won't change when you load an operating system, the prom still won't know the exact information without the operating system telling you.

Dual 300Mhz CPUs was the highest possible configuration for the original octane.

The easiest way is to load the operating system and then type in expanded form of the inventory command: hinv -mv

Output will look similar to this: https://just.graphica.com.au/tips/what-i...-hinv/amp/

This only works inside the operating system, I believe, but inside a terminal on Irix running this will show you the part numbers read out of the serial EPROM information attached to the major hardware components. This is how the operating system matches drivers you load with the hardware. It just looks up the part and serial number information on each piece.

So I would hold off until you actually load it with an operating system in order to figure that out. It'll give you the full detailed inventory once you're inside the graphical interface and you use the system information selection.

Also I know you probably have another drive on order. I would not fool with the drive that comes with it unless you don't care about the contents. Possibly somebody else on the board could walk you through attempting to break into the previous installation in order to see what software is there and other stuff that might be highly Desirable left over from commercial purchases.

But you will obviously need a working Irix to break into an other Irix drive. There shouldn't be any encryption or anything available in those days so once you have a working OS you should be able to insert the other drive and read it as a raw data file system, altering it so that you can actually boot and get past the login screen is a different issue. But definitely you should not fool around with the original in case the drive is on the verge of failing so you can learn enough to know where to go and how to inspect what it has to preserve any licenses it might have or similar before that disc possibly has an issue from being run after all these years.