[weblacky]

As I mentioned for the most part no SGI system supports booting from third-party PCI/PCI-X add-in cards that weren't SGI branded, unless the PROM is updated to do it. And as you mentioned the ROM on those cards are normal PC ROMs, that means nothing to the PROM.

As I mentioned there MAYBE a FC-AL Fiber Channel HBA controller the PROM supports for SAN FC booting (I remember reading it somewhere in a PROM changelog regarding fuel a while ago) but I've never encountered a parallel SCSI Controller (Add-in Card) that could boot an SGI. From our experience you must, must, boot the operating system from the embedded controller, whatever that is. You're free to add in cards that use the exact same chip as the control controller or anything else that Irix understands but the PROM isn't Irix!

Not that I suggest wasting your time, but you could get an SCSI UW 68-Pin-to-50-pin SCSI adapter board and force the hard drives into single-ended (SE) mode and try to boot from the narrow 50-pin SCSI embedded (second) channel on the fuel mainboard if you just wanted to see if the drive might start, but in reality you'd have to muck with the startup variables anyway to get it to start Irix as SGIs do not automatically search for and boot from an active drive like you would find on a normal personal computer. They are set by their NVRAM parameters on what drive controller & ID to boot from. That's why we normally recommend people do not do odd booting setups and just go with the default so that it just works.

To address your desire to somehow test what's on the drives before you go any further let me be perfectly straight about that. Does the knowledge of the drive(s) working have anything to do with you keeping the Fuel system? I mean let's face it whether the drives work or not, does that have any bearing on you keeping the fuel and wanting to see it run?

So I don't understand how the two are related. Whether the drives are ready to use and have an operating system on them is inconsequential to whether the fuel works or not. I understand you're in South Korea and so unfortunately the situation is very different for you. Otherwise I would just sell you a cable and you would just go on with your life. So what I would suggest is the following.

The fuel is one of the most fragile, circuit-wise, and therefore one of the more rare SGI's because so many of them broke, burnt out, lit on fire, etc. They are temperamental systems in their own right normally from age or bad power. The design is not fundamentally wrong that you can't have a stable fuel, the issue is that due to age and sometimes neglect damage could happen to the system that prevents it from correctly operating. We know how to correct most of this damage under most average conditions at this time. So knowing that you're going to put in resources to get this thing started. If you're lucky you buy a cable, you put in a drive, you see what's there and maybe it doesn't work and then you download the operating system install files and then reinstall the operating system.

So I would say that you wouldn't care about preliminary tests because the system is worth more than the hard drives. And unless you are fully dependent on these drives working, like there's some data you wish to retrieve on them, I would consider the matters two separate issues. Right now you do not have the hardware to boot, you must have the correct cable because you must boot from the embedded controller on an SGI workstation.

Investigating the drives should really come after you've actually installed a blank drive and installed the OS yourself so that you could become familiar with how it works in order to correctly operate whatever is on those drives.

You can load an old Linux PC with a distribution that was before 2017, install a SCSI controller in it and then install XFS_Progs (from before 2017) and then be you'd be able to read the file system on the drives using the Linux PC. Support for XFS V1 & v2, which is what the MIPS Irix stations use, was pulled in February 2017 from the Linux drivers, so you have to run an older distribution in order to regain support for the older XFS file system versions.

But if you already have all the hardware for that then you can spend your time loading the Linux software on a standard PC that you have and get an older Linux distribution to work and read the disk drive file systems that way.

You need to understand the SGI workstations were not designed to be consumer friendly. Treated it like you and treat electron microscope or CNC machine, you were supposed to have a service contract they were supposed to come either preloaded or a tech would come back onto your site, or your administrator, to reload and fix the station and you would click the one program you knew how to use and use it. Their firmware is not consumer friendly, they don't have the same recovery options or the same automation that you would expect from a normal computer BIOS. They are actually very rigid and they do not handle well when you go off script with them.

I would strongly advise you to take the opposite approach of what you're doing. The system is at least worth a good chunk of money, even if it's dead, buy the IBM cable as best you can for your location. Get a blank drive or a a drive you're willing to reformat and blank, and expect to actually get the computer running and install the fresh/clean OS yourself. This will help you know if the computer is working properly or if the motherboard has any problems. After all why would you want to risk the data on those drives when you don't know if the computer's hardware is even stable or safe? Get the cable, get another cheap Ultra160/Ultra320 68-pin drive, a 6 GB or 9 GB would be just fine. You don't need to buy a 20GB or a 36GB+ just run the operating system and experiment.

You need to get the system running with a clean operating system and then let it run to prove to yourself it's stable and works, then you can go ahead and connect the additional hard disk(s) as secondary drives and peek at them using your fresh operating system or attempt to boot them, or whatever your desire is. Don't mix two unknowns and expect to come out with a success. You don't know the system works and you don't know what's on the drive. Sounds like you don't want to plug in those drives into the system, it sounds like you want to get the system working and then plug the drives into that.

SGI collecting will take money, you will keep spending money until it works. These are considered vintage electronics and they're fairly rare. Fuels are one of the most rare modern SGI systems because they had such a high rate of failure and they were disposed of thus. The ones that survive have survivor bias but even then you have to be extremely careful with as they can do damage. In fact once you get your system working you should make sure to change the power supply to a third-party ATX using the community ATX adapter because a bad/malfunctioning power supply can damage the mainboard in several ways! That's what killed most of them.

Consider everything I've said if you wish to proceed further. Even after you boot it it may not stay booting if you have an old power supply that could give up the ghost. So even after you start it if you wish to keep using it you may keep pushing money into it. Decide right now what your limit is and how you want to go about this and just focus on getting the system to boot a clean operating system. Then worry about those multiple hard drives you have.

You'll need a bit of luck but it helps if you keep the community updated with what you're seeing, as we've usually seen just about everything.