[gmcenroe]

I booted up my Indigo 2 and during boot I saw several errors:

WARNING: wd93 SCSI Bus=0 ID=1 LUN=0: SCSI cmd=0x2a
Unexpected info phase 46, state 4e, Resetting SCSI bus

It did boot up but froze up on the desktop when I tried to open a window. 
I did a hard restart from the power switch and after booting up got an alert

Critical System Error
ALERT: Integral SCSI bus 0 reset

I did a restart from the menu and all seems find now. What caused this error. I may have hit the power switch last night before the computer shut down on a shutdown command from the desktop. 

Images below.

[jan-jaap]

SCSI command 0x2a is WRITE.

A disk with write errors may suffer from bad sectors or simply have accumulated enough bad sectors to run out of spares.

[gmcenroe]

SCSI command 0x2a is WRITE.

A disk with write errors may suffer from bad sectors or simply have accumulated enough bad sectors to run out of spares.

Are there any tools to diagnose or determine hdd health on an SGI? Is it possible to convert to an SSD drive?

[jwhat]

Hi mgcenroe,

given machine cannot boot as is, your best bet would be to pull disk and put it on either another SGI box or a Linux (RedHat) Box with XFS file systems support.

I have successfully mounted IRIX disk with old Fedora Linux and so I know this is possible, but have not tried with more recent Linux.

Your safest bet would be to mount disk read only to avoid further possible corruption of disk.

You can convert a "working" HD to SSD quite easily by using ACARD SCSI -> SATA adaptor (expensive) or LSI SAS3442X PCI SCSI/SATA Adaptor (cheap).

The process of copying boot disk is well documented (and there is a shell script for this around), in summary:

1. Use dvhtool to copy files out of the source boot disk header
2. Use fx -x to get source disk partitiion details (is it: root + swap or root + swap + user) and note the boot header details ( boot disk likely to have: boot = /unix in header)
3. Use fx -x to partition target disk
4. Use dvhtool to copy the boot header files into target disk volume header
5. Use xfs_dump / xfs_restore to copy file sytems over (either directly or indirectly)

On IRIX disk diagnostics:
- fx has a excercise option that will tell you if disk is good or not, but not repair it.
- IRIX has low level SCSI commands tools, but if you going to pull the disk and put into another machine, I think it would be easier to use linux tools for this.

NOTE #1: you cannot boot from SSD on LSI SAS/SATA Adaptor... but can copy the boot disk so to boot from SSD you will need ACARD or equivalent.

NOTE #2: use dd to create a bit level copy of your disk, if you want to try to do deep explore, I have never tried this but if might be loop mountable on Linux with XFS..

Cheers from Oz,

jwhat/John

[gmcenroe]

Hi mgcenroe,

given machine cannot boot as is,  

Thanks for all of the advice, however as I wrote, I was able to boot after a few tries. I will look at fx to determine the health of the disk.

I'm looking on ebay for a good replacement, like an IBM 9GB such as this one known to work on SGIs : https://www.ebay.com/itm/296007320098

[jwhat]

HI gmcenroe,

good that machine is booting, another cheaper SCSI alternate is one of the various SCSI2SD (SCSI to SD / CF ) options.

I use this for my very old PC/Fedora Linux L3 Controller / L2 Emulator and works a treat.

Cheers from Oz,

jwhat/John.

[gmcenroe]

HI gmcenroe,

good that machine is booting, another cheaper SCSI alternate is one of the various SCSI2SD (SCDI to SD / CF ) options.

I use this for my very old PC/Fedora Linux L3 Controller / L2 Emulator and works a treat.

Cheers from Oz,

jwhat/John.

Ya looking for a ebay disk replacement, will try to clone the current drive to it or just do a fresh install of IRIX, I have all the CD disks