[foreman]

Hello, I'm new here. I recently was given a teal Indigo2 4400 with Elan graphics (I believe it may have an Indy CPU? hinv shows it is 175Mhz) and I have been trying to get it running. This is my first SGI/Irix/Unix system. The farthest I have gotten is the maintenance menu.

At first I was plagued with an SCSI device failed error:


I found that the old boot drive (a 1GB IBM that originally had Irix 5.3 on it) was dead, so I placed the option drive still in its own sled in the slot where the boot drive had been. Originally, the boot drive was showing as disk one and the option drive was disk 2. I rebooted with the new drive configuration to find that the option drive was now somehow disk 4, and there was no disk 1. The highest disk was now the cdrom at ID 3. I figured there should be a way to install to a drive that isn't ID 1, so I ran FX to format it and tried to run the first disk of the Irix 6.5.19 install anyway.

I now got this:


I read over this thread:
http://forums.irixnet.org/thread-1826-po...l#pid11937
And this one:
https://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=98078

But still couldn't fix the problem. I figured it must have to do with the SCSI ID. So, I shutdown and pulled the drive back out. Mind you, I have never dealt with SCSI drives before. First, I tried following the directions on the drive to set the ID:


The brown (ground?) Wire was on ADDR 4, so I moved it to 1.


Put it back in, powered on, still ID 4. Then I read over this:
http://forums.irixnet.org/thread-1485-po...ml#pid9506
and came to the conclusion that I should use the original drive sled. But, the ID connector on my drive was female and the sled was was also female so I joined them with some cables:


I felt pretty good about this, but alas, it was still ID 4. I again have up on trying to change the ID, and instead tried added an env variable swap=dks0d4s1, and for good measure root=dks0d4s0. This also did nothing.

Here is my fx partition data on the hard disk:


At this point, I am at a loss. What am I missing?

Any help is appreciated!

[weblacky]

Hi,
I wrote the article you referenced, I tried to look back at my work, and I think I still got it right (I may have reversed it myself, but I checked two drives I have and ID Bit 2 is opposite Ground column on the sled connector on both my drives, so I think it's valid). But it's hard to follow your coloring because the connectors are hard to clearly see in your picture. Let's assume your connectors follow colors and don't change colors between connections :-) Let's also assume white goes to brown. Keep brown where it is, it's correct.

Unless I'm misreading the colors, I think you transposed the upper wires 180 degrees.

You are correct, where you but the "bit" wires versus the single "ground" wire on the drive. So the upper vs lower is organized correctly - live vs ground is correct. But I think the order of your upper isn't right.

From your picture, I think your wires are currently attached to the sled connector in this order:

Orange = ID bit 0
Yellow = ID Bit 1
Blue = ID Bit 2


So looking right at your drive connection picture, I assume you should be 2, 1, 0 = Blue, Yellow, Orange

If you mix up the top row, your ID bit 0, triggers position 4 (ID 4) on your jumper. I think I have this right. So please flip your drive-side connector to match what I've indicated and see if that works. Normally repeated ID 4 means you've rotated the order of bits 180 degrees, swap Orange and blue on the drive-side by turning your connector 180 degrees around and plugging it back in.

Let me know, I'd hate to find out my info was wrong :-(

In regards to formatting, Irix formatting is weird. There are two options for drive layout: Root drive (RO) and Option Drive. You have to have a root drive layout to install an OS, "option drive" layouts allow the system to know it's for data-only and no OS is there. So you need to use FX to auto-create a root drive (RO)

I believe it's: Repartition, Auto, RO

Hopefully that unstuck you :-)

[foreman]

So looking right at your drive connection picture, I assume you should be 2, 1, 0 = Blue, Yellow, Orange

If you mix up the top row, your ID bit 0, triggers position 4 (ID 4) on your jumper.  I think I have this right.  So please flip your drive-side connector to match what I've indicated and see if that works.  Normally repeated ID 4 means you've rotated the order of bits 180 degrees, swap Orange and blue on the drive-side by turning your connector 180 degrees around and plugging it back in.

That was exactly it! Thank you! My ID is now 1 and my swap partition error is gone. I am happily running Irix 6.5.19. Funny how such a small mistake could cause so many issues

[weblacky]

Great to hear, also glad my info wasn't wrong...that would have been embarrassing (considering).

Please do stay involved with the group, a word of warning though (if you haven't read the Indigo2 manual -- you should by the way). Don't try to place an HDD in the CDROM bay (if you can ever get the 5.25" sled), documentation says it won't cool well enough (unless you go like flash SSD mod or something). The drive sleds don't support hot swap, don't try it!

Don't run the system more than a few minutes without it's skin (case), it may overheat (there was an article floating around on SGI using thermodynamic super computing modeling to figure out the airflow/drag/cooling when designing the Indigo2...doesn't work without the case.

Teal Indigo2 power supplies are cheap and plentiful, consider picking up a working one on eBay for like $50 for later need. Purple (IMPACT) PSU are MUCH more expensive and more rare, Teals cannot use IMPACT graphics, so their power requirements are much lower, hence the difference in PSU. You can use an IMPACT PSU on a Teal Indigo2, but not the other way around!

Otherwise, you should be set to have fun!

[foreman]

Thanks for the tips! I did download a copy of the manual before I started working on mine. I'm impressed with how comprehensive it is.

I also did some reading on PSUs, I'm definitely considering buying a spare.

My next challenge is to connect to the internet!