[technica348]

Hello all,
I acquired a Octane from Japan earlier this year since it was a steal after all the shipping costs, and I recently acquired ram for it. Now I did manage to get the lightbar working on it, and it is showing a solid red LED with the power LED on immediately when I plug it in. All fans are spinning and I see a green LED inside the CPU board and two green LEDs (do not know what order) by the serial port. Serial port is gone for unknown reasons (factory forgot to solder it?). Am I right that this machine does want to boot but due to the fact that I don't have a cable for the display it can't? Also I am wondering if there is a jumper on the CPU board or PSU to set it to where the system does not immediately power on when I plug it in. Otherwise everything else seems okay, the compression connectors are in good shape and none of the connectors are bent.

[jpstewart]

First off, you should see a minimum of three LEDs lit on the frontplane:  the BaseIO and Heart LEDs should be always on, plus one for the graphics card.  (And more if you have the PCI cage or other XIO cards installed.)  You need to figure out which LEDs are lit and what's missing:
https://wiki.preterhuman.net/SGI_Octane#...plane_LEDs
http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems...l#problems

Secondly, there's no jumper to stop the automatic power on.  That's a symptom of a bigger problem.  A normal Octane won't do that.  I seem to recall mine did that once after swapping some components.  But only the first time I plugged it in.  After a normal boot-up and power-down cycle it returned to normal.  If the behaviour persists on yours, you'll need to track down the problem.

Oh, and finally, that's not a serial port on the frontplane of the Octane.  It's an undocumented header and the connector is always omitted.

[weblacky]

Octane serial ports are on the rear (under keyboard and mouse PS/2 Connectors). Lookup the Octane manual for info on pinouts required to establish a terminal with it. ALL SGIs output serial info of some sort while booting, but many stop if there is a keyboard and mouse attached because they assume you have a monitor. If you remove the keyboard and mouse and just have serial, chances are good you'll get full output and can see where it's stopping you.

Yes ,the RED error LED should turn off once done with startup tests and into the PROM. Several things are possible right off the start.

If you have an OLD revision Octane mainboard you cannot use more than 2GB of RAM and you CANNOT use high density RAM made for later Octanes. So if you just got RAM...REMOVE and put back what was there. You can insert the peripheral modules assembly in upside down! Make sure it's Right side up (A towards the top), and finally a bad RTC battery could be stopping you as well during first power-on (but I'm not 100% sure on Octane).

The serial console will tell you more.

[technica348]

Thanks. BaseIO, QA and Heart LEDs are on. I think the issue with it always turning on when plugging in may be the PSU. I may have to get a new one, but I'll check the serial logs first when I can get a serial to USB so I can read it on a PC. I don't see anything else off with the boards and backplane. I gutted it all and put it back together earlier today.

Edit: To add, I put in 512mb of ram from 4 (128mb) dimms. This is an older revision of the octane with the older logos for the octane and sgi logo.

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I also checked the ram to see if it is the high density kind and it is not. There are memory module chips on both sides. My Octane did not come with ram...