It depends on what kind of modern computer you have. If you're running a modern like Windows 10 or Windows 11 system with a lot of storage space the easiest thing to do is the simple use hyper-v or virtual box and install an older copy of Linux there.
The easiest way is to create a DD image of the drive on another machine and just transfer it to an older virtual machine running the appropriate software. You don't necessarily have to match the hardware and the software as long as you have the storage space.
For an example you could get an old machine and runner older Linux, or you get a newer machine and a newer Linux it shouldn't matter as long as you have normal PCI or PCIe bus to run a SCSI card, get the needed ribbon and adapter/converter for the drive along with the drive itself. And again I would get a small fan or a desk fan placed on another table to prevent vibration to blow air on it if the drive is a large volume it's going to take a while.
Then take the giant blob with a disk image and transferred it into a VM that has the older software.
FYI I found the change log for XFSprogs:
https://fossies.org/linux/xfsprogs/doc/CHANGES
Irix FS support was officially removed AFTER version xfsprogs-4.9.0 (5 Jan 2017).
It would take too long to describe everything about SCSI to you and you'll end up learning it anyway if you keep reading other places so I'll just show you the basics. As most people are saying SE, stands for single ended, was basically the first parallel SCSI standard. Low-voltage differential, known as LVD, came afterwards but has a special mode to detect being on an SE bus and downgrade itself correctly. There's also often a jumper you can place on the drive that forces it into SE mode to begin with which is often helpful. Not every LVD device on the planet can do this but it's extremely common for most consumer hard drives. There is a way to check this easily using the standard logo printed on the drive, explained farther down.
There's a 50 pin interface that a couple different external ports use and then there's a 68 pin interface that a couple of ports use and the difference between them is an eight bit bus versus a 16 bit or higher bus known as a wide bus. Wide buses use 68 pins or more. Narrow buses use 50 pins or potentially less on the older standards before SGI's really came around.
A brand new LVD disk understands what a 50 pin SE bus is you just have to adapt it with the appropriate adapter card. No the cards are not expensive they should be around under $30 US these days.
The entire SCSI bus runs at the lowest standard of device hooked to the chain. So just because you buy an ultra 320 drive doesn't mean it's going go at that speed. You could wind up at a good 10 MB a second if you attach it to a slower speed chain with a bunch of slower speed devices. They all work at the same bus rate as a limitation.
The buses must be terminated, this is either done internally in the controller or with a small card at the end of the ribbon if it's a modern SCSI bus. Older SCSI buses could be terminated with a special jumper at the last hard drive. But LVD drives don't have such a jumper because the LVD standard cannot be terminated using the last drive on the chain. There must be a physical terminating circuit attached to the last port in the ribbon cable on an LVD bus.
Your octane uses two separate controllers. One controller is in charge of the three slots inside the case. This is AUTO terminating and AUTO set. Which is why they chose SCA 80 interface drives. Not only were they cheaper but all you have to do is shove them in and turn the system on and their SCSI ID and SE mode and everything else is already set by the back plane! In fact zero jumpers for configuring a new hard drive.
The rear port is an ultra wide 68 pin high density connector. It's run by a totally separate controller and hence is a separate chain. It does not share a bus with the internal drives. They are not all on one bus each bus is totally separate from the other. This means they can run at different speeds where you could put an old SCSI scanner on the external SCSI port that runs at SCSI-2 speeds but still run SCSI-3 ultra wide speeds internally.
This would allow a slowly external device (CDROM) to operate without slowing down your internal devices. If they were all on the same bus and you attached an old scanner to the back of the machine then the entire bus has to run at the speed of the scanner face. You wouldn't want that. That's why there's two separate channels/buses.
Because SCSI can have some complex nuances but it was actually made to be pretty easy with the understanding that everything on the consumer market was usually downward compatible. If you had an old Mac as long as you got the right adapter for your case or an external enclosure to put the adapter and drive in a metal box to give you a higher interface you could attach it to your old system and you'd be fine. The signaling standards can't be intermixed: SE, LVD, HVD. HVD stands for high-voltage differential and as a standard you will stay very far away from and never interact with at all. The SCSI symbols that you see on the device actually indicate the standard.
https://iec.net/home/technical-informati...i-symbols/
Note that there is a logo of the standard where you can market device as LVD that is unable to downgrade to an SE. You can easily see the symbol on the label of all these hard drives to make sure you know what you're buying.
Oh very clever from a compatibility and intermix standpoint.
To do a drive imaging you cannot adapt an SE drive to an LVD bus. It ain't gonna happen. So for that reason if you're imaging hard drives you're often going to use an SE bus and then an adapter card to downgrade the LVD device to SE. So all you have to do is buy an old card with a 50 pin ribbon cable narrow SCSI-2 bus. Get the adapter card to adapt an SCA 80 drive to a 50 pin narrow SCSI-2 and you're done. Now granted the price of these has gotten higher over the years because this used to be considered trash that most people threw away. So you're dealing with those that didn't get thrown away. But even so you shouldn't be into it for more than $100 at a reasonable cost to get a working well-known adaptec card like an adaptec 2940UW on PCI or a higher cost Adaptec 29160 on PCIe for more...
All of those have a 50 pin narrow interface that comes out the back of them for CD-ROMs and things like that. Just use that with a narrow ribbon and get a cheap adapter to downgrade to LVD and you'll be fine. Cooling is the only other issue you'll have in the environment if you're doing this for an hour or more.
Microsoft tried to sabotage SCSI starting at Windows 8. Technically Windows 7 drivers seem to work in a lot of places but there's no guarantee. A lot of interface technologies were purposely damaged or ruined starting at Windows 8 because Microsoft made a decision. I don't know the intricacies of that decision but that's why a lot of old interfaces suddenly dropped off the planet around that time.
Windows 7 was the last modern like operation support parallel SCSI in all its forms. Windows XP was the last OS to support parallel port scanners and parallel port drive interface technology as well as I think infrared IrDA and a few other similar tech technologies.
Having a Linux laptop that has a a card bus slot could be of used to you because you can run cardbus adapters for SCSI using external adapters and an external enclosure and read drives out that way. There's a few sun microsystems enclosures that support SCA 80 to 68 pin Ultra Wide internally.
That would make that kind of reading to be pretty slick. But that's probably going run you a couple hundred dollars.
FYI, there are other forms of SCSI that are not parallel SCSI. Parallel SCSI means it uses these big connectors and a ribbon cable internally. There are other forms of SCSI such as fiber channel SCSI, Serial attached SCSI, even virtual network using iSCSI. Some of these were available for SGI, none of them can be used to boot Irix from. Irix can only be booted from an internal mainboard controller and often cannot be booted from an external add-on card even if the add-on card has a driver under Irix. There might be one exception for fuel and Tezro using a fiber channel adapter as there was a prom upgrade for fiber channel support. So that might be possible but every other combination is not possible.
So while you can get adapter cards for certain SGI's to go with other faster SCSI standards you still can't boot the operating system off them. For example there should be a way to put a faster SCSI adapter card in the PCI card cage of an octane to have a faster external speeds than what it has internally. That still does you no good in running the operating system any faster.
Unlike a Windows or potentially an older Mac machine, you cannot add hardware to produce another drive controller that you can boot from on SGI. So if you have a damaged internal controller that's it you're done with that motherboard. You have to boot from the drives internal controller then load drivers for other faster peripherals that came later.
![[Image: collection.png]](https://jurassic.nl/images/collection.png)
mine! ...played with in the 90s & long gone: 
(past: 
)
NEED -> 
