Sounds like you understand the risk involved. Here's the information you asked for:
This is the general L1 "public" guide for the entire platform:
https://bukosek.si/hardware/collection/s...-guide.pdf
There is slightly more known by the community but there is no published source for it. This is pretty much all you're going to find openly.
From INSIDE the L1 terminal, command to ignore ALL env should be: env off
https://web.archive.org/web/202208140340...206/1.html
From INSIDE the L1 the commands to ignore JUST THE TEMPS is: env temp off
https://pixelbart.net/SGI/IRIX/i/65/19/d.../ch03.html
From inside Irix you'd prepend l1cmd to do that...but you aren't in Irix. I am unsure if shutting off the temp monitoring also ignores fans or not. It's been too long and I've never actually done it myself. So you may have to shut off the entire ENV, but you might try the temp subset first in case that will still allow you to maintain voltage monitoring.
In terms of what's actually good, the prom performs a fairly quick diagnostic of most things, including your graphics memory, before you should see the graphical interface. There is a much more rigorous PROM diagnostic called factory diagnostic that you can enable with virtual switches but that's usually not really required. I would personally say that if you get to the PROM graphical interface and go to the terminal and type: hinv
And get a good hardware listing and things look like what they're supposed to be that I would assume you're good until you hit a problem. The only problem I would expect you to ever hit is either that you have a flaky memory module or that your power supply is so old that it's nearing failure and you'll wind up with very odd VRM dips and other power related alerts and warnings. Outside of those two things I wouldn't expect anything odd. I would however say that when you load Irix it naturally resets a lot of your boot params, so that tends to clear out any weird stuff that people do. But overall I would trust the PROM diagnostics 98% of the time.
So I have some personal experience with fiber channel arbitrated loop drive raise, and I even have some controllers for SGI but I've never actually got that far on them. I can tell you that later SGI's all use the same PROM and have a note in the final revision about updating to allow the fastest 4Gb fiber channel controller to support the PROM. So I do assume that SGI branded or clone-style PCI-X cards could actually boot the system from external FC-AL drives. I can't make that guarantee.
I wanted to try this for a long time because it would allow most my machines to remain without any hard drive in them at all and that way they would not only be much quieter but I could simply use an emulated fiber channel link on something like SCST for Linux, to create boot volumes for them to natively boot from prom. I know that late model SGI's like yours should be able to do this, I do not believe that systems like the O2 and the Indy and indigo to and such can do this. I'm pretty certain the octane can do it with the XIO Fibre card version.
When it comes to compatible clones I really don't know. You'll have to try to find an old information of which compatible clone equals what SGI card. I'm not even sure that every SGI fiber card was actually boot compatible. All of the compatible cards will obviously read secondary volumes once Irix starts. But if you're looking for a fiber HBA to actually boot the system from an external SAN I would say I'm not entirely sure but I know one or two of the cards should be able to do it but you may have to get an SGI specific card and not the chipset compatible clone from like Qlogic or whatever.
It's actually been so long you may be the one to tell us what seems to work and what doesn't. Like I said there is very limited support for bootable HBA's in all of SGI's. Even the officially supported SAS and SATA controllers are not PROM bootable! But I'm 100% sure there is one or more cards for your platform that is bootable, assuming you have the last PROM revision loaded. Because that is part of the 1.48 prom changes list. Patch 7148 I think has the last SGI PROM...hopefully someone else can verify.
basic starter info:
https://archive.irixnet.org/apocrypha/ne...376/1.html
https://web.archive.org/web/201603251532...er_Updates
https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-4032-p...l#pid29516
user Jwhat has a nice archive of this stuff, I should have a copy somewhere, of all the PROM versions and all the flashers that you would need as each ProM bin file only works in a certain flasher version, it's a problem. So if you're L1 and PROM are very old, fix it first and then once you get Irix running you'll need to upgrade whatever's left. You have to chain load the bin files to the right flasher versions as you go. But you can do so within the same Irix version as long if it's a later version like 6.5.30. I've done this once. On your platform the serial number will sometimes disappear during flashing. Make sure to write down your serial number before flashing, it's usually easy to add it back in.
This should all have what you need for now. Good luck and let us know.
NOTE: Oh, so when you turn off the ENV you will be turning it off! You turn it back on by doing the opposite command and use the word "on" instead of "off". So assume all commands are "sticky" unless told otherwise.
But havent them powered up since 10Y and nekochan died.
NEED -> 