[weblacky]

You know, looking back through your post, you don't mention what kind of Indigo2 you have. By that I mean, Purple or Teal case? Impact graphics? R4400? R10000? Because I'm wondering what graphics set you're using. Is the graphics card a single board, or multiple PCB boards joined together with spacers? Does it have long black heatsinks on it?

Take the graphics back out and do your serial terminal thing again. When you get to the menu, select 5, then type: hinv

That will give you a primitive listing of the hardware (you need a OS running to get the expansive list). Then post that hardware inventory output. While it won't show a graphics set, it will show processor type and ram. Then if you we'll know at least what COULD go in it.

While there MIGHT be a short in your graphics card...(or they are incompatible) it actually sounds like a power supply issue. The graphics board takes a large amount of power, it's possible that during start-up your PSU is weak and it's undergoing a voltage drop when it's fully loaded (included with drive). It's just a thought, but I've never heard of a "shorted" Indigo2 graphics card, so I'm thinking it's system load related. Can you remove the cover and take a picture of the Power supply label on the side of the power supply?

I have a fully cleaned (extra) PSU for a Teal Indigo2 MIPS3 (PN: ITT Power systems PEC4074) that I know works great If that fits your Indigo2 that I'm willing to sell cheap. If it's an IMPACT graphics Purple case, the PSU cost is greater because it's a different model, and I don't have one of those for sale.

These PSUs aren't easy to troubleshoot because of the limited physical access. Maybe try graphics but no hard drives? See if the serial terminal comes up? Old drives take like over 1A+ (combined voltage rails) during spin up...it might just make the difference between getting to PROM with graphics or acting dead.

Also perhaps change the graphics slot being used, in case the GIO slot has damage of some sort causing a short?

Sounds to me like you have found the heart of the problem, it was likely let go due to this issue. While I'm not 100% certain, I think the power supply is the issue right now. Tell us what hardware you have, and the current PSU label and then we'll see where we can go from there.

[itsvince725]

Oh sorry, you're right, I didn't mention. It's a R4400 teal Indigo, 150MHz, with a two board graphics setup (GR2 Elan if I remember correctly) and 96MB of RAM. It's not a power supply issue as I swapped the PSU for another one and had the exact same problems, and it's really unlikely that I'd have two bad PSUs. PSU is a PEC something, probably the same as what you're selling (both PSUs I have are the same PSU).

[weblacky]

hmmm...

Well then, I'm going to suggest looking at either checking that it's actually "seating" correctly (even insertion of connector, equally spaced gap on connectors after insertion, etc...) on the GIO64 slots. From memory, the GIO64 of an Indigo2 has two busses and two slots share a bus (I believe two upper and two lower pairs). It can be tricky to make sure the power connector beside the GIO64 slot gets correctly seated (I recently removed a teal backplane for cleaning and reinserted the board set, it took a little wiggling and inspection to ensure it didn't stop prematurely and fake being seated, both backplane and boards).

If insertion into the (I assume) unoccupied secondary bus (lower slots) produces the same issue, then perhaps you really do have a damaged graphics board set? When you say the drive doesn't start with graphics installed, I assume you get no boot tune or anything? You didn't specify if the front LED behavior changes at all (which could help indicate why it's upset). Did you check that nothing appears on the serial terminal during boot when you have both drive and graphics installed? Sometimes stations will give diag errors via serial when they are in trouble during boot.

You may be forced to buy a lower-end graphics set off eBay to test a different graphics option to see if that fixes it. We've seen OS kernel panics due to board sets being bad but I've not personally read or heard of a no-boot scenario.

Outside of options like (did the previous owner swap mainboards and have incorrect PROM revisions to support the graphics set) and other odd, outside issues like that, we need more symptoms to proceed further.

Try booting different hardware configs with serial terminal open and running, and see if you get any useful output to aid you.