[Purr]

Hi,

I've got this Octane which powers up correctly, serial console is OK, video output also, everything fine, except that it hangs on the power-on diagnostics part when booted.
When a harddisk is present, the serial console doesn't show anything at all and doesn't react to keypresses. Video shows the power-on diags message, then after a while the system resets itself and the same happens again. When I remove the harddisk from the system though, it goes on to shows the System Maintenance Menu.
When the system is booted without a harddisk present, the machine boots into the System Maintenance Menu both at the serial console and video output.

I'm unsure if the harddisk even spins up, but I suspect it doesn't. I've replaced the disk, but the system exhibits the same behaviour. I've also tried using another Octane PSU, but this also didn't fix the problem.

Has anyone seen anything like this before?

[robespierre]

Not sure, but perhaps there is a problem with the disk compartment backplane or the connection between it and the IP30.

[weblacky]

Dumb question, are you setting any jumpers on your disks…your not supposed to on Octane (perhaps you can set party and delay start). IDs and termination must be left off so the Octane backplane sets those options through the SCA80 connector.

Otherwise, I’ve not seen this behavior either.

[Purr]

Wow, those are some swift replies, thanks! :-)
One of the drives I tried did work at some point in the past. I'll try my O350 bootdisk sometime next week, see if I get any further with that.
And otherwise I guess I'll need to venture deep into the machine.. Ordered a SCSI backplane on eBay just in case..

[vishnu]

Fortunately the rocket scientists at SGI designed the Octane to be really simple to take disassemble and reassemble.

[Purr]

While waiting for the SCSI backplane, I saw an "untested" Octane2 for sale at a discount, so ordered that as well. This untested Octane2 didn't work as I assumed, but it did have an Xbow 1.4 (my Octane only has an 1.3) and only the motherboard seems to not be working, no surprise there since it was missing a CPU module.
Switched the motherboards and it looked like it still wasn't working. I might have had a bit too little patience though. Don't know for sure.

I then found this post: https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-1674-post-11001.html and used Irinikus' screenshot to set the SystemPartition and OSLoadPartition . Unfortunately I didn't check my previous values, but anyway after setting these, the system booted!

So now my Octane2 2x600MHz is finally running, got some spares in the process and upgraded to Xbow 1.4, yay! :-)

Used to dream about owning such a system back in the day....

[robespierre]

It looks like resetting the boot variables should be the preferred advice for all kinds of booting problems.

[weblacky]

We’ll he said “hangs” and maintenance menu as two different observations. If you don’t have right booting variables, shouldn’t you just stop at PROM when auto starting? I’d assume he could get to graphical PROM but have a PROM terminal with a boot failure/not found message, right?

[robespierre]

I think if the NVRAM contents are corrupt then pretty much anything can happen. The firmware reads them at various different points, e.g. for selecting console ports (early in the boot process) and for finding the boot loader program (later in the boot process).

[weblacky]

I guess that’s valid, I mean it was the answer after all?