[weblacky]

yes i really want to preserve whatever is on this drive. i tried looking up how to break in and apparently its easy if you take the drive out and mount it under linux, then you can change the root password in a text editor like vi. there are other ways of doing it but that seems to be the easiest way.

but i don't have any adaptec scsi card in my pc to attach it to. will any adaptec card work for this? i can get one on ebay if you recommend me some good inexpensive models. it would be so nice if there was a external enclosure i could put the hdd into too, or some scsi to usb enclosure thing so i don't need a adaptec card.

i did not order an extra hdd yet, i do want to but i'm really not sure about which ones are going to be ok or not. you brought up a lot of things about them that i never considered, and i'm not sure if those would become problems or not. another thing was, i'm not sure if the ones with drive sleds on them are welded on or can be easily taken apart. since we need to put it on a sled for the octane2 and i dont think the sleds are all the same type.

Well good luck with that, as I mentioned you have to run an old version of Linux (Pre-2017) to read the XFSv2 file system.  Newest Linux out of the box will recognize the drive partition but will think the file system is totally corrupt and unusable. As I warned you previously. Modern Linux only reads XFS v3 & v4, hence why I said you would use one Irix to break into another. MIPS SGI used XFS v1 & v2 (after 6.5.5).  Especially because assuming you get multiple trays for your Octane you can put it several discs in an Octane so it's simple as just not using the booting slot/position and putting the old root disk in the next slot up as a secondary drive.

The drive you showed me on the sled is simply held in by screws. I've never heard of any system that permanently attaches a drive to a sled. That doesn't exist from my understanding. Some sleds might be overly complex in the old days. But anything made in the past 20 years is usually held in by four or six screws. You'll be like the rest of us and have to purchase sleds for the octane from eBay. They were used on a couple of SGI cluster systems, not just the octane so they're actually more prevalent than say 02 sleds.  Still expect to pay a fair amount per trade and normally somebody steals all the screws so you'll have to buy screws too.  I can rediscover what they were, I knew but I never wrote them down.

It's worth picking up two trays in total for your octane. You're going to want to be able to insert another physical drive in there for various reasons in the future. It's worth having the tray.

The truth is the more you've had the eBay seller test it the higher the price is going be. So I would advise you to just get a smattering of cheap drives that look good.

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

If we define "original Octane" as system with a 030-0887-00x mainboard and 2GB RAM limit, then dual 400MHz R12000 is the max. Apparently there's a revision of the single 600MHz R14K CPU that works too.

Code:

Location: /hw/node
      PM20400MHZ Board: barcode KXN674    part 030-1476-001 rev  D
        Group ff Capability ffffffff Variety ff Laser 0000004d748b
Location: /hw/node/xtalk/15
            IP30 Board: barcode HMT046    part 030-0887-005 rev  A
        Group ff Capability ffffffff Variety ff Laser 00000029d4f2
Location: /hw/node/xtalk/15/pci/2
    PWR.SPPLY.ER Board: barcode AAE9050433 part 060-0035-001 rev  C
        Group ff Capability ffffffff Variety ff Laser 00000031379a
            FP1 Board: barcode JBZ155    part 030-0891-003 rev  E
        Group ff Capability ffffffff Variety ff Laser 0000002fb85f
Location: /hw/node/xtalk/12
          MOT20 Board: barcode HKG598    part 030-1240-003 rev  H
        Group ff Capability ffffffff Variety ff Laser 00000037497d
Location: /hw/node/xtalk/11
          MOT10 Board: barcode HMG917    part 030-1241-002 rev  H
        Group ff Capability ffffffff Variety ff Laser 000000374645
2 400 MHZ IP30 Processors
Heart ASIC: Revision E
CPU: MIPS R12000 Processor Chip Revision: 3.5
FPU: MIPS R12010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 0.0
Main memory size: 2048 Mbytes
Xbow ASIC: Revision 1.3
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 2 Mbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
  Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0 (unit 1)
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty1
IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty2
IOC3 parallel port: plp1
Graphics board: EMXI
Graphics board: ESI
Integral Fast Ethernet: ef0, version 1, pci 2
Iris Audio Processor: version RAD revision 12.0, number 1
  PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x10a9, device 0x0003) PCI slot 2
  PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x1077, device 0x1020) PCI slot 0
  PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x1077, device 0x1020) PCI slot 1
  PCI Adapter ID (vendor 0x10a9, device 0x0005) PCI slot 3

I guess technically I'm incorrect if you want say that the newer green octanes with the crud SGI logo spelled out, that use the revised motherboard, are still 1G octanes then we've sort of muddled the matter.

The information I've gone on claims no such 400Mhz Dual CPU upgrade exist for the original board: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/mfinbow/octane/upgrading.html

So this is new information to me.