[weblacky]

OK, super dumb question from rereading your initial post:

You obviously knew that you use an external terminator on the internal SCSI chain, you're not enabling internal termination on the storage devices right? That timeout error during CD boot would lead me to believe you have multiple terminations on one or both side sides of your chain turned on?

SGI machines of this vintage should have parity enabled on everything, do you have parity on everything? You're not supposed to mix this setting, either all devices have it or none of the devices have it enabled.

The terminal has a date command, so go into your PROM terminal and actually set a real date so it doesn't complain: https://techpubs.jurassic.nl/library/man.../ch09.html

What do you have externally attached? If you're using a external optical drive did you also match termination? Are you doing active or passive termination on the external?