[rbz]

** TL;DR **
Got a cheap Octane that supposedly was packed full of vfx/editing software, got antsy and ended up wiping the system drive, no idea what was actually on the machine but believe it might have had flame on it. One drive is full of user folders, but inside of them are a ton of Mac (iTunes, Library, Photos, Documents, etc) folders, so I am guessing it was also used for a remote home disk or something? More questions below.

** Questions **

1. Are there any files in particular I should look for in the multitude of user home directories to see what kind of software they were using on this machine since I wiped out the main system drive? For example, there is a generic render user folder on this drive.
   
2. Has anyone seen IRIX being used as a remote home directory or backup machine for Macs before? The drive itself definitely is from the Octane as its xfs formatted but using an Octane as a remote mount for OSX seems odd?
   
3. If an installed drive generates the error below (no mater which slot its in) is it good as dead? I do feel the drive spin up.
   Internal SCSI device/cable diagnostic *FAILED*
   External SCSI device/cable diagnostic *FAILED*
   
4. The drive bays seem extremely tight, in fact the bad SCSI drive sled’s handle ripped off the first time I tried removing that drive and even the other two bays seem extremely sticky/tight. I don't even try "clipping" in the handle all the way as it's very resistant to clicking in flush. Is this normal? Should I try cleaning the slides with something? The sleds are 050-153-001 REV A. 
   
5. Is there a good media player for IRIX that I can try to play the various video files I found in the user folders (QuickTime, WMV)?
   
6. The original login screen had the company logo in the pick-a-user box position and you had to type in the user, how do you set this up?
   

** The long story **
I just picked up my first SGI after wanting one since the 90s when I was really into 3D modeling at the time (DOS/Windows Impulse Imagine and 3DS Max).

I occasionally check the local Craigslist for SGIs ever since I got the retro-computing bug a few years ago when I picked up a NeXTstation Turbo on a whim off eBay (another childhood desire fulfilled... if only it was a cube). Usually nothing shows up but this time an Octane was local, and the person didn't want much for it, said it booted and showed me pictures of it sitting on the maintenance screen. He said that he picked it up as part of an auction from a Hollywood visual effects / production company. "It has all of the software on it", but of course he didn't know the login. I didn't even bother asking the specs of it because it was a decent deal and I have been wanting an SGI for so long. He included a 13W3 to 4 BNC component cable as well as a Logitech PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse.

The first thing I did when I got it home was turn it on, even though I didn't have a way to hook up video yet, and unfortunately the red LED on the light bar was on and I could see that the white bulbs had burned out long ago, but I could hear the drives spin up at least and with a set of headphones I heard the startup chime.

Eager to get this thing going, and see what was on the system, I grabbed an old VGA cable and the 13W3 component cable and went to my workbench and made a 13W3-VGA cable, it's not very pretty and since the BNC only had 4 lines it's just setup for Sync-on-Green but the Dell 1907FPc I have works with SoG so no big deal.

When I hooked up the monitor, I was able to see that it had a SCSI error. It has three drives in it, so pulled the top two drives leaving the chunky IBM DRHS drive in the bottom slot as I figured this is probably the original system drive. Removing the extra drives did the trick and after a bit of booting I was greeted to a login screen. 

But unlike most IRIX login screens I looked at online this one had a custom splash image where the normal pick-a-user area is that was the company's logo and then had a spot to enter the login name, and sure enough root with no password was a no go and I had no idea what other users to try.

Now here is where I should have spent a lot more time looking into things, but I was excited and anxious to check this thing out. I had googled various ways to get reset the password and landed on Resetting the root-Password, but unfortunately, while I had an old Adaptec 2940w laying around I had no older desktop readily available it would work in, and its cabling didn't support a SCA connector. So I looked at the next thing, netbooting. The first hit for "netboot raspberry pi irix" was this site, Net Booting/Installing Vintage Computers from a Raspberry Pi, so I busted out my Raspberry Pi 3 and followed along. After some frustration I was able to get into sash64.

I started up Install and this is where things went wrong, and a bit embarrassing. While the machine booted and gave me a login screen, In Install I got an error saying it couldn't mount the root file system and dropped me to a shell to fix the issue. I rebooted and confirmed it went back to the login screen as before so I started the process again and again got the same error about not being able to mount the filesystem and dropping into a shell for me to fix it. I then ran across the techpub IRIX® Admin: Disks and Filesystems and one of the troubleshooting sections (pg 40, step 17) said if the you got this error and it dropped into a shell do a mkfs /dev/dsk/dks0d1s0, now this is where my spidey-sense started going off and thinking this isn't right and I should have just stopped, but the other steps also reference recreating the file system but on all of those it has a warning when you run the mkfs command that it will wipe the disk and prompts for confirmation. I figured maybe this is just for a temp drive or something since I had read that the installer happens in its own special environment. So, I ran the command, and like the techpubs output shows it didn't prompt for confirmation, or warning that it would wipe the drive. I then was able to get into the Install menu where I then went to the Admin section and dropped back to the shell, where I proceeded to go to the /root directory and... to my unsurprising surprise... the drive was empty outside a few std *nix folders and the passwd file seemed to just have the standard IRIX base users. Fearing the worst I quit the installer and sure enough now got a failure to mount the boot drive error upon boot. Oops, time for full reinstall.

I decided to reinstall the other drives and see if there was anything on them, unfortunately the top drive which was an IBM Ultrastar 36.7gb disk, still prevented the system from booting, but the middle Seagate 73.4gb drive seems good, and appears to be the drive where all user home folders were mounted. 

The interesting thing about these user folders is that they seem to have folders that mimic a Mac OSX user home directory in them. There are Desktop, Documents, Library, Movies, Music and Photos folders and inside the Music folder a lot have iTunes folders, but the drive is formatted xfs so I am sure this drive is from the Octane. After browsing around the few dozen home folders I did run across various materials that showed various images from commercial advertising campaigns as well as a bunch of QuickTime videos that the default IRIX 6.5.30 media player can't open. I ran across some work logs and resumes on the machine that did imply the people that were around this machine were experienced with Flame and Fire.

** The Lesson **
mkfs is never the answer if you are trying to preserve data. I should have spent more time looking at how to get in. Mad at myself I did this after I wiped the drive and I realized that I should have:

1. Seen if the default `guest` account was still available to see what was on the machine and what other users I could see 
   
2. Seen if I could have gotten in from the `single` user mode via the PROM 
   
3. Buy a internal 68 pin to SCA adapter and borrow an older desktop to get the Adaptec 2940w working in it so I could mount the Octanes system drive to clear the root password, or take a spare SCSI drive and do a fresh install of IRIX on that, to preserve the original system drive.
   

** Specs **
Old Silicon Graphics Logo Octane case
2xR10000 225mhz 1mb cache (originally a 175?, but CPU upgrade sticker also says CMNB015UF250?)
1536mb RAM
SI Graphics
PCI Cage (no cards)

Drives:
IBM DRHS COMP IEC-950 36gb
Seagate Cheetah ST373405LC 10k 73.4gb 
IBM Ultrastar DDYS-T36950 10k 36.7gb

** Mods **
Repaired the light bar with a warm white LED
3D Printing a replacement drive sled to block off the open third bay

** Up Next **
Purchased a Granite RT6856T Keyboard to replace this Logitech PS/2 that only supports scancode 2, life without an ESC key among others is really annoying. It's fairly yellow so I plan to pull it apart and retrobrite it.

Oh, and I was super happy to run across this site with an active and supportive community IRIX/SGI!

[kaigan]

Hello and welcome! The Octane feels like the quintessential SGI machine to me - fast, performant, and beautiful. It's always nice to see another one around here!

I can't say I'm an expert on all of your questions, but I'll answer as best as I can and hopefully others can fill in some details:

1 and 2. I'd treat them more or less like you were examining an OSX machine in terms of file locations. While I haven't heard of an SGI machine being used in this way, there were/are tools to mount XFS volumes on OSX. It's possible that the Octane was acting as a sort of server during a transition period for a company to or from SGI gear and both machine types were being used. If you find any particular files of note, some of the folks here who have more experience in 3D modeling, animation, etc. can likely provide more detail.

3. If the drive is failing diagnostics like that, I'd imagine that it's pretty well dead. Drives of this age tend to be a bit of a crap shoot in terms of how well they work. The tried and true recommendation for replacements around here are NOS Seagate Cheetah 15000 RPM 300 GB drives from eBay. They're not that expensive and many were manufactured as late as 2013 and never used. I have quite a few of them and they work very well.

4. I've noticed a bit of this myself on machines with those carriers, including my Octanes, Onyx2, and Origin200. I'd suggest cleaning the rails and sleds with a bit of high-percentage isopropyl alcohol to remove any dust or grime and then wiping a very small amount of white lithium grease on the rails to help things move smoothly. You don't need much of it at all, just a very thin coating.

5. There are a couple of current development efforts that have led to better media playback on IRIX. Mplayer seems to be the tool of choice. Nekoware contains an older version and an updated version of Axatax and Raion's efforts is available here: http://gitea.irixce.org/Raion/neko_mplayer. drmadison also had been working on version 1.4, but I'm not aware of a code repository for it yet.

6. I'm actually not sure on this one and my initial research (read: Googling) isn't indicating a lot. There's a little bit of info here from a method using a Nekoware tool: https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Use_Custom_...nd_on_Irix

Hopefully that's helpful, and hopefully others can fill in some more details. Of course, if you have any other questions, I'll do my best to answer them as well.

[rbz]

Thanks for the responses!

I will give mplayer a shot and see if it can play some of the files I found as well as giving the slides a really good cleaning. The one good thing about having the dead third drive is without it in place it does make getting the middle drive in and out a lot easier.

[drmadison]

I do have mplayer 1.4 building / running in IRIX. However, it's notably slower than the previous versions, due to some hand optimizations we did on those early nekoware versions. I'm looking at bringing some of those changes forward, as I just don't find a version that's more compatible, but 40% slower, to really be much of an update.