[mamorim01]

Greetings everyone,

I have been reading the forums for some time, I meant to register earlier on shortly after nekochan's demise, but things kept getting in the way. I own a few SGI units which I have been gathering over the years, and I am slowly bringing them back to service. Most of them were non functional at the time I procured them, missing or dead hard drives, some of them had minor issues of some kind such as the Indigo2 that crossed Europe inside a cardboard box with no padding (sad face, plastic bits all over the place). Two units are practically restored (an Octane and the Indigo2) and a third one is getting there (an old and humble Indy). If anyone is interested, I would be happy to post pictures and hinv outputs.

I do have a quick couple of questions which I hope someone can possibly share some light into.

- I have been having some issues with the hard drive in the Octane, which was shipped with the unit with a clean 6.5 install. I managed to reset the root password through miniroot (booting from DINA) and the system is practically functional although there is a bit of trashing and non-responsiveness at times. Running xfs_check shows a bunch of errors which I would like to repair, if possible. Running xfs_repair requires the drive to be unmounted so, seeing as I do not have access to a CD-ROM, my only chance seems to be running xfs_repair through a miniroot from DINA. This does not appear to work, as I seem to be unable to unmount anything from miniroot (ie, /dev/root: device busy or /dev/dsk/dks0d....: device busy). I get the exact same errors as if I had booted from the main drive instead. Short of pulling the drive from the unit and mounting it in other computer as second drive, is there an easy way to run xfs_repair in the Octane so as to fix the hard drive?

- As for the other question, the Indigo2 (teal color) was originally fitted with a GR2-XZ graphics card, and it is running 6.5.22. I eventually managed to find an Elan card for a very reasonable price and went on to install it in parallel with the XZ hoping to be able to run a dual head configuration at some stage (I moved the XZ card to the originally empty slot, and installed the Elan card in the slot which was originally occupied by the XZ card). Would this kind of configuration possibly work? The system detects both graphics cards but I am unable to get any video out of one of the cards. I have not attempted a reinstall of the OS, in case it might matter, which I think it could.

Thank you all for reading this and for carrying the torch, it is great to have a repository of information for these machines. I keep a close eye on your efforts to port more software and bring development tools up to date. I sure hope I could do something along those lines, but my expertise is very far from having meaningful coding skills. Hope I can eventually provide something in return nonetheless.

Cheers!