[Intuition]

*JAW DROP *

Wow, that is a work of beauty now. 

[Jacques]

That is amazing!! Very well done and you can be rightly proud of your efforts. I hope you enjoy using it!

[CB_HK]

Thank you both! I’m still waiting on a few parts to come in before I can start running diagnostics and make sure everything is running as it should. I’ll be adding more posts as I get around to reassembly and testing.

[CB_HK]

Part 4: Reassembly and Testing

After waiting a few weeks for the last parts to arrive, I'm finally able to reassemble and test the machine!

** Two folks I'd like to give a big thank you to: Jan-Jaap for hooking me up with an InfiniteReality 3 boardset and Raion for a replacement power supply. Shipping SGIs or parts can be very tough, thanks to how things are mishandled by shippers. I'm happy to say that both Jan-Jaap and Raion did a fantastic job in packing and shipping their parts! **

I won't focus on each step to put the machine back together, since it is exactly the reverse of how I took it apart in the first post. What I will say, however, is to go slowly and make sure things are fitting correctly. There's nothing worse than rushing and then having something break. Thankfully nothing like that happened here.

First up will be the power supply. I knew I wanted to replace it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it's almost impossible to just open one up. It can be done, but it's complex and all the pieces rely on one another to stay together. Considering how banged up the old one was in addition to how dirty it was, I'm happy to say that the replacement from Raion worked perfectly.



Initial boot after reassembly. Checking to make sure AC voltage is good as well as no fault light.

If you remember from a previous post the conversation about running the system on 110v vs 220v, I have decided to stick with 110v for now. I don't have the required 220v outlet available in my house, for one, and for another I'm not showing any errors at the moment with the power supply or system. If I start to have problems down the road I'll reevaluate and perhaps have a 220v outlet installed.

First Boot

If this is the first time you are booting your SGI, I'd strongly recommend making sure you have a terminal attached before power on. As I would quickly find out, the system defaulted to console mode with no display except for a blue gradient listing the graphics installed on the bottom left corner. Also, the Onyx2 checks its memory every time it boots. This is not a short process, especially with 8GB of RAM installed. I left the system alone for around 10 minutes before I got to the PROM.



One thing that I forgot to do initially was to reset the hardware data. The old 180MHz boards and IR2 system that was installed was no longer present and the system started to give me a few errors here and there. This first one popped up during boot, showing on the terminal, as well as graphically when trying to load IRIX.



And this is where I had my lightbulb moment. I had forgotten to update my hardware inventory through the PROM and clear out the system logs!

I had only a vague idea of what I needed to do. Thankfully, there was a handy reference titled Onyx2 Diagnostics. I'm guessing this was once a post on Nekochan that has since migrated to the Higher Intellect Wiki. You can find the post here.

After reading and following the commands I needed to run in order to reset the Onyx2 and tell it that I had new hardware components installed, the system booted correctly and showed proper output for gfxinfo and hinv.

irsaudit

After solving the hardware issues, it was time to verify everything. Jan-Jaap's boards had already been run through irsaudit before he shipped them so I had high confidence there would be no issues. However, I was only able to get one RM from him. I contacted Doug Mashek and secured another RM10 from him in order to have a 2 RM system. He cautioned that he didn't have a chance to verify it before sending and would warranty any issue I found. So, off to run irsaudit to make sure everything was working together as it should!



irsaudit is truly entertaining to watch. It is far above and beyond faster to run than any other graphics check I've done so far.



All boards checked out with no errors!

Coming up - Part 5: Conclusion

The last part of this post will detail all the work I had to do in order to bring this system back to life. I'll give the latest hinv along with a list of parts replaced, cleaned, etc.

Stay tuned!

[srosefx]

Sir
I am living my dreams through you!
Amazing find and restoration.
I was given 2 O2's and an Octane, unfortunately they were in IMACULATE condition, until the freight delivery man through the boxes off the truck! now the cases are junk and bent chassis, I am gutted.
looking forward to more of this build.
Simon

[Irinikus]

The thing that always seems to amaze me when it comes to people who ship O2’s is how unobservant they are!

All you need to do, is pick one of these machines up to realize how fragile they are!

They’re unmistakably fragile in the hands, and yet people still try to ship them without taking the necessary precautions, when it comes to the packaging!