[weblacky]

Yeah, you have a few options, if you’re REALLY GOOD AT ALIGNING IDC connectors and vice crimping you can undo the board-side crimp and relocate the connector past the cable damage and re-crimp.

I say that like it’s easy, but it is not. The chance of accurately crimping all the lines is very low and most likely the connector ends up being slightly skewed, which ends up perforating one of the neighboring lines, along with the line you intended to hit and so internally creates a short. But if you had set up or made a jig that would perfectly align the ribbon cable inside an open connector and then allow you to compress the connector enough to keep it in place while you transfer to a normal wood-shop vise, it could be done. It’s just very difficult to accomplish.

Basically, this means you’re shortening the cable which isn’t a huge problem because there’s way too many connectors anyway.

One thing I thought about is whether I can find a normal ultra160 68 pin connector to actually replaced the current one onboard. To the naked eye it certainly looks like the pin positions are all the same because of the way it’s crimped. If I could find a connector that fits on the same footprint, we could check with a multimeter if there is a one to one match from the footprint to the parallel SCSI cable connector for each drive. If so the onboard connector itself might be able to be replaced so we can get off this horrific proprietary cable treadmill, in the future that is.

In the short term, you can bite the bullet and just buy a compatible cable. The nice thing about the compatible cable is you end up getting two ends that work. So you have a chance of being able to separate the cable if you wanted to in the two cables (though I have not tried that). Or just rotate the cable 180° if you damage one end, you can simply put the terminator after the damage and rotate the cable and use the connector from the other side on the mainboard.

The cable you need is: IBM 40H7572

It’ll be unusual in that it’ll have the same connector at both ends as if it were an infinite string. You only plug in one end into the fuel and you’ll need to purchase a separate ultra160 removable SCSI terminator to properly terminate the string. The original Cable from SGI has the terminator permanently attached to the end. This one will not so you’ll need to purchase a 68 pin, removable ACTIVE terminator and apply it after your last drive.

No one has done a full survey to ensure there isn’t some form of adapter card you can’t boot from, but as far as we know, there’s no guaranteed card that you can put in a fuel and boot the OS from. So unless you’re willing to invest time and money in doing that survey, our answer is there is no way to natively boot the Irix operating system from an add on controller in an SGI fuel.

[nhattu1986]

Hi weblacky.

Thanks you for the cable part number, it easier for me to find some.

for now, i will need to find the memory replacement first

[nhattu1986]

2023/05/27 update:
So i buy new the ram module from ebay -> no dice, the same error.
Then i buy new scsi cable as weblacky suggest -> installer continue as it should be.

Conclusion: it all the issue with the scsi cable that prevent me from install IRIX.

I managed to install IRIX and the machine is running fine.
Next step is to acquire new snaphat batter from digikey and fix the psu adapter fan monitoring.

[weblacky]

Good to hear, just watch that SCSI cable! I've found even myself almost pinched it three times when last working with my fuel. You know it's there, you know it's going to pinch, and you know what the problem is, and yeah sometimes you're almost still damage that cable in the rotating cage.

Good luck and glad to hear you got past this issue.

[johnnym]

[...]

In the short term, you can bite the bullet and just buy a compatible cable. The nice thing about the compatible cable is you end up getting two ends that work. So you have a chance of being able to separate the cable if you wanted to in the two cables (though I have not tried that).  Or just rotate the cable 180° if you damage one end, you can simply put the terminator after the damage and rotate the cable and use the connector from the other side on the mainboard.

The cable you need is: IBM 40H7572

It’ll be unusual in that it’ll have the same connector at both ends as if it were an infinite string. You only plug in one end into the fuel and you’ll need to purchase a separate ultra160 removable SCSI terminator to properly terminate the string. The original Cable from SGI has the terminator permanently attached to the end. This one will not so you’ll need to purchase a 68 pin, removable ACTIVE terminator and apply it after your last drive.

Not sure if this is the right place for it, but I didn't find anything better and the wiki doesn't list part numbers for replacement stuff. I recently took apart one of my IBM B50s and came across a similar cable from what I could see of 40H7572 online. The SCSI cable in the B50 also has two identical ends and three regular HD68 male connectors (i.e. pins inside the connectors and not receptacles) in between, two go to the DASD bay (one per disk drive) and one is for the drive in the media bay.





I measured the following lengths between the connectors:

Code:

[special connector #1]
|
ca. 23.5 cm
|
[hd68 connector]
|
ca. 4.5 cm
|
[hd68 connector]
|
ca. 40.5 cm
|
[hd68 connector]
|
46.0 cm
|
[special connector #2]

The installation is a little uncommon in that the one end (#1) goes to J33 (Internal SCSI 16-bit conn.) and the other end (#2) goes to J4 (Internal SCSI conn. #2), see the B50 handbook for details. Not sure how this works and if it is compatible with the Fuel, but it looks very similar to a 40H7572 cable assembly. The label on the cable tells 24L2667 and searching for this cable online I came across this page which also lists 04N4243 for it. So this could be another possible replacement for a damaged SCSI cable of a Fuel.