[AK5fa]

Dear Experts,

I'm very new to the SGI and IRIX Universe, but I did look at the FAQs and did quite a bit of Googling before posting this. However, if I still sound like a newbie, please forgive me for that.

The long story short, I got a SGI Fuel system (IP35) with 700 MHz R16000 CPU, ODYSSEY Graphic board and a Seagate ST373405LW HDD connected to the add-on Qlogic 12160 PCI-X card (not the onboard SCSI connector!).  The problem is, the system does not boot to the IRIX and all I can do is to go to the PROM console.

There, typing "hinv" without options shows that add-on Qlogic 12160 controller as controller 2 and 3 (in addition to the Qlogic controllers 0 and 1 that are built-in). Also, the HDD is shown as dksc(2,1,0) not the dksc(0,1,0) as specified in "setenv".  The "hinv -v" command shows a SCSI interface on Module 001c01, Widget 14, PCI ID 1 (that is in addition to the similar one on the Widget 15 which is onboard).

The person whom I got this rig from knows that it does not boot, but swears that the data on the HDD are good! He also gave me a spare HDD (which I assume could be a copy of the 1st one).

So, the important question is:
 Is it even possible to make a system with an add-on SCSI adapter boot in to the "sash" and beyond (provided that all data on the HDD is alright)?

Unfortunately, I can't just remove the add-on SCSI adapter and connect my HDD to the onboard (HD68) connector, because I don't have the proper cable!  So, I've been trying my best to get the system to at least recognize the HDD somehow.

Additional things that I have tried to achieve the above goal are as follows:

1) I tried to use the "disable" command to disable the onboard Qlogic controller so that the controller on the Add-on card would be re-numbered from 2 and 3 to 0 and 1.
    But the PROM replied to me "Cannot disable the Master Baseio". Well, I think I got the correct parameters for the "disable" command because it did work to disable the add-on SCSI card (on Widget 14). But that was not what I really needed. 

2) I tried to use the "ls" and "boot" commands.
    The "ls dksc(2,1,0)/" command replied 'no such device'. And the "boot -f dksc(2,1,8)/sash" command replied "Unable to execute ..." and "Unable to load ..."

3) My last desperate attempt was to try to modify some PROM variables from their default values as follows and then reboot:

Code:

setenv scsihostid 02
setenv ProbeAllScsi y
setenv root dks2d1s0
setenv SystemPartition dksc(2,1,8)
setenv OSLoadPartition dksc(2,1,0)

... but that did not help at all.

Did you happen to notice anything wrong in my configuration? Or do you have any advice/recommendations for me on what else to try?
Or do you need some additional info before you advise?

Please let me know... One way or another...

Thanks a lot in advance and Best Regards,
AK

[vishnu]

Probably a stupid question, but is there a reason why you aren't you using the on-board SCSI controller? Also, what version of IRIX is installed? Or, more to the point, it needs at least 6.5.17...

[weblacky]

From our general knowledge, I believe there’s a fiber channel HBA that you can boot from with the last PROM, as it’s mentioned in the change log, but otherwise no.

All of the add-in cards that are SAS, SATA, and parallel SCSI cannot be used for booting the main operating system. You must use the internal SCSI controller.

I understand that the cables aren’t easy to come by, I’m trying, along with Kuba, to start to produce a source of these cables independently that are shorter. Kuba has a few that he’s already produced that he might be willing to sell.

The compatible IBM cable normally comes up in Google searches as: IBM 40H7572. 
If you go with the IBM cable, you’ll need to get a detachable ultra160 terminator to attach to the last 68 pin high density connector on the chain. Also, this particular cable has proprietary connector at both ends as it’s meant to connect to a different system, but the pinout is the same. I’ve had three separate people use this Solution to great affect. You don’t have to cut off one of the ends just put the terminator on the last real drive connector at the other side of the chain.

Hopefully in the near future, I can try crimping the correct fuel connector onto existing ultra160 cables, but I don’t have the equipment and the test for those cables going right now so it’s probably going to be a while. You would have more luck just using the IBM cable for now.

These days they normally go for about $55 maybe $60 on eBay. Check out different sources if you can. PM me if you just want to buy one of the cables, I should have several. but I’m in Seattle Washington USA so it would be international shipping to where you are. You might be able to find one local at a better price.

Also as a new owner, be aware that the reason these cables get damaged is they are incredibly long and people have a tendency to store them in the hard drive bay that swings out of the side or they store them above it in the empty 3.5 inch bay. That could be a great idea until you swing out the drive bay and end up catching the cable and damaging it. All of us have either damaged the cable or nearly damaged the cable, swinging out that hard drive bay and catching the long internal SCSI cable.

So there’s a nearly 100% chance the reason that you didn’t have the cable was the previous chain of owners caught it in the drive bay and damaged it. It’s incredibly common for fuel systems.


You’re putting in more work than just buying the correct cable. If you have no other prom or L1 issues, then you’re doing great. Normally either you should have a bad power supply or you should have tons of prom errors due to faulty internal monitoring. So if you have none of those then just buying a cable gets you off easy when it comes to getting a fuel running.

[AK5fa]

Probably a stupid question, but is there a reason why you aren't you using the on-board SCSI controller? Also, what version of IRIX is installed? Or, more to the point, it needs at least 6.5.17...

Hello vishnu,

Thank you for your prompt reply. But the reason why I can't use the on-board SCSI is that I don't have the proper cable!  The connector on the Fuel mainboard is different from the ones used on most of the relevant SCSI add-on cards!  I don't really have a clue why the system was designed like that.
As for the version of the IRIX, I don't know. I haven't been successful to get the system "see" any data on both of the HDDs which I have. 
As OP says. the HDD is visible in the "hinv" output, but trying to do "ls" or "boot" results in a 'no such device' error.

Thanks and Best Regards,
AK

[vishnu]

The fuel mainboard has a 68 pin connector for hard drives and digital audio tape and a 50 pin connector for the CD, both are SCSI.

[AK5fa]

The fuel mainboard has a 68 pin connector for hard drives and digital audio tape and a 50 pin connector for the CD, both are SCSI.

Yes, the Fuel mainboard has a 68 pin connector for U160 SCSI drives. But it's a SCA68 Male connector, which is physically quite different from the HD68 female connector that are used on the HDDs and on the add-on Qlogic 12160 SCSI adapter card. I can post some pictures here if you need more detail. 
That's why any of the standard SCSI cables cannot be used to connect the Fuel mainboard to an HDD. You need a special cable or some kind of adaptor. As @weblacky mentioned, a Google search for IBM 40H7572 would give you an idea of what kind of cables/connectors are needed...

Thank you and Best Regards,
AK

You’re putting in more work than just buying the correct cable. If you have no other prom or L1 issues, then you’re doing great. Normally either you should have a bad power supply or you should have tons of prom errors due to faulty internal monitoring. So if you have none of those then just buying a cable gets you off easy when it comes to getting a fuel running.

Hello weblacky,

Thank you for a detailed reply and an offering me the proper SCSI cable (direct from mainboard to the HDD). I really need to think in that direction...

But what puzzles me the most in my current situation (with an add-on SCSI card connected to the HDD) is:

Why does the PROM refuses (can not?) see any data on the the dksc(2,1,0) or dksc(2,1,0) devices or even the devices themselves?


I have tried to replace the original SCSI cable which was included with the system with a new one which I have.  The results are the same for both HDDs!
As I mentioned in the OP, the HDDs are detected (the dksc(2,1,0) device and model name of the HDD are visible when I do "hinv" and "hinv -v" respectively),
but no additional data from the HDD can be seen (the "setpart -l" returns nothing)... Of course, the "boot -f ..." does not work either.

I doubt that data on 2 or more HDDs has been corrupted in the same way. And the problem with the SCSI cable seems unlikely. Then, could it be a problems of
the SCSI add-on card?

I do have at least 2 Adaptec 29160 PCI-X cards, but I did not try either of them.
Can those cards be used in the Fuel as is or they need to have a different Firmware / BIOS?

I am worried that if even if I go through the troubles and get the direct SCSI cable (from the Fuel mainboard to the HDD), I would end up facing some other (perhaps a BIGGER) problem. 
So, could you please recommend me to some other preliminary tests to see that the HDD data is more or less consistent with a working IRIX OS and file system?

Thank you and Best Regards,
AK

[weblacky]

As I mentioned for the most part no SGI system supports booting from third-party PCI/PCI-X add-in cards that weren't SGI branded, unless the PROM is updated to do it. And as you mentioned the ROM on those cards are normal PC ROMs, that means nothing to the PROM.

As I mentioned there MAYBE a FC-AL Fiber Channel HBA controller the PROM supports for SAN FC booting (I remember reading it somewhere in a PROM changelog regarding fuel a while ago) but I've never encountered a parallel SCSI Controller (Add-in Card) that could boot an SGI. From our experience you must, must, boot the operating system from the embedded controller, whatever that is. You're free to add in cards that use the exact same chip as the control controller or anything else that Irix understands but the PROM isn't Irix!

Not that I suggest wasting your time, but you could get an SCSI UW 68-Pin-to-50-pin SCSI adapter board and force the hard drives into single-ended (SE) mode and try to boot from the narrow 50-pin SCSI embedded (second) channel on the fuel mainboard if you just wanted to see if the drive might start, but in reality you'd have to muck with the startup variables anyway to get it to start Irix as SGIs do not automatically search for and boot from an active drive like you would find on a normal personal computer. They are set by their NVRAM parameters on what drive controller & ID to boot from. That's why we normally recommend people do not do odd booting setups and just go with the default so that it just works.

To address your desire to somehow test what's on the drives before you go any further let me be perfectly straight about that. Does the knowledge of the drive(s) working have anything to do with you keeping the Fuel system? I mean let's face it whether the drives work or not, does that have any bearing on you keeping the fuel and wanting to see it run?

So I don't understand how the two are related. Whether the drives are ready to use and have an operating system on them is inconsequential to whether the fuel works or not. I understand you're in South Korea and so unfortunately the situation is very different for you. Otherwise I would just sell you a cable and you would just go on with your life. So what I would suggest is the following.

The fuel is one of the most fragile, circuit-wise, and therefore one of the more rare SGI's because so many of them broke, burnt out, lit on fire, etc. They are temperamental systems in their own right normally from age or bad power. The design is not fundamentally wrong that you can't have a stable fuel, the issue is that due to age and sometimes neglect damage could happen to the system that prevents it from correctly operating. We know how to correct most of this damage under most average conditions at this time. So knowing that you're going to put in resources to get this thing started. If you're lucky you buy a cable, you put in a drive, you see what's there and maybe it doesn't work and then you download the operating system install files and then reinstall the operating system.

So I would say that you wouldn't care about preliminary tests because the system is worth more than the hard drives. And unless you are fully dependent on these drives working, like there's some data you wish to retrieve on them, I would consider the matters two separate issues. Right now you do not have the hardware to boot, you must have the correct cable because you must boot from the embedded controller on an SGI workstation.

Investigating the drives should really come after you've actually installed a blank drive and installed the OS yourself so that you could become familiar with how it works in order to correctly operate whatever is on those drives.

You can load an old Linux PC with a distribution that was before 2017, install a SCSI controller in it and then install XFS_Progs (from before 2017) and then be you'd be able to read the file system on the drives using the Linux PC. Support for XFS V1 & v2, which is what the MIPS Irix stations use, was pulled in February 2017 from the Linux drivers, so you have to run an older distribution in order to regain support for the older XFS file system versions.

But if you already have all the hardware for that then you can spend your time loading the Linux software on a standard PC that you have and get an older Linux distribution to work and read the disk drive file systems that way.

You need to understand the SGI workstations were not designed to be consumer friendly. Treated it like you and treat electron microscope or CNC machine, you were supposed to have a service contract they were supposed to come either preloaded or a tech would come back onto your site, or your administrator, to reload and fix the station and you would click the one program you knew how to use and use it. Their firmware is not consumer friendly, they don't have the same recovery options or the same automation that you would expect from a normal computer BIOS. They are actually very rigid and they do not handle well when you go off script with them.

I would strongly advise you to take the opposite approach of what you're doing. The system is at least worth a good chunk of money, even if it's dead, buy the IBM cable as best you can for your location. Get a blank drive or a a drive you're willing to reformat and blank, and expect to actually get the computer running and install the fresh/clean OS yourself. This will help you know if the computer is working properly or if the motherboard has any problems. After all why would you want to risk the data on those drives when you don't know if the computer's hardware is even stable or safe? Get the cable, get another cheap Ultra160/Ultra320 68-pin drive, a 6 GB or 9 GB would be just fine. You don't need to buy a 20GB or a 36GB+ just run the operating system and experiment.

You need to get the system running with a clean operating system and then let it run to prove to yourself it's stable and works, then you can go ahead and connect the additional hard disk(s) as secondary drives and peek at them using your fresh operating system or attempt to boot them, or whatever your desire is. Don't mix two unknowns and expect to come out with a success. You don't know the system works and you don't know what's on the drive. Sounds like you don't want to plug in those drives into the system, it sounds like you want to get the system working and then plug the drives into that.

SGI collecting will take money, you will keep spending money until it works. These are considered vintage electronics and they're fairly rare. Fuels are one of the most rare modern SGI systems because they had such a high rate of failure and they were disposed of thus. The ones that survive have survivor bias but even then you have to be extremely careful with as they can do damage. In fact once you get your system working you should make sure to change the power supply to a third-party ATX using the community ATX adapter because a bad/malfunctioning power supply can damage the mainboard in several ways! That's what killed most of them.

Consider everything I've said if you wish to proceed further. Even after you boot it it may not stay booting if you have an old power supply that could give up the ghost. So even after you start it if you wish to keep using it you may keep pushing money into it. Decide right now what your limit is and how you want to go about this and just focus on getting the system to boot a clean operating system. Then worry about those multiple hard drives you have.

You'll need a bit of luck but it helps if you keep the community updated with what you're seeing, as we've usually seen just about everything.

[AK5fa]

As I mentioned for the most part no SGI system supports booting from third-party PCI/PCI-X add-in cards that weren't SGI branded, unless the PROM is updated to do it. 

Dear weblacky,

Thank you for the detailed explanation and advice. I will be trying to get the original SGI P/N 018-1005-003 cable. I appreciate the info about the IBM 40H7572 cable, but the one I'v seen available on eBay doesn't look very trustworthy. On the other hand, this cable available on eBay looks nice and new, but I don't think it can be used here because it only has 2 connectors! So, as far as I can see, there is no way to attach a SCSI terminator to it!

Would you agree with my assessment?
Or do you think that cable would work?

Please check and let me know.

Huge thanks in advance and Best Regards,
AK

[weblacky]

Hmm, yeah I don't see this happening. Because the vast majority of LVD drives don't have on-board termination. I can't speak for all of them but I know that Seagate Ultra160+ drives don't. I can't imagine that was a unique decision, but I'm not 100% sure.

If I were you I would do two things here:
You should be able to get a 50 pin narrow SCSI ribbon cable and you can use the 50-pin connector on the fuel to see if you can boot from that. Because your first question is does this system have any other issues, right?

While I've never tried it you can obviously boot from the narrow SCSI bus with an optical drive for loading install media. So I don't see why you can't install an operating system on a narrow drive on the same chain. Granted I've never tried this, but if you use a SCSI to SD adapter, which is going to be a lot cheaper than finding a 50 Pin SCSI hard drive these days, unless you already own one, you could temporarily proceed down that path so that you could unstick yourself and keep going without the SCSI Ultra160 cable, for the time being.

I don't have any crimped cables ready, I do have the IBM ones, but I was going to crimp generic SCSI Ultra160 cables with the appropriate fuel connector instead of their normal one. I do know somebody who's already crimped a couple of these who's on this forum, he's actually a seller of sorts and so he could probably sell you one of his modded cables. I can't speak to the price he'd ask, but he's normally pretty reasonable and so I assume it'll probably be a very fair transaction.

Why don't I put you in contact with him, I can send him a message to contact you about the cable and you both can hash that out? Sending a cable to South Korea really isn't that expensive. The cable itself will bundle up very tightly into a small package and so realistically I don't think we're talking bank breaking numbers here.

So why don't you consider going through the narrow SCSI channel 1st, because you should definitely be able to find a cable and an emulation device at a much cheaper price than anything else in your local vicinity, and you could continue that way.

Simultaneously I can notify this other forum member about you and see if he'll reach out to you using the PM function here. That way you can arrange a tested cable just to be sent to you from somebody who already has a fuel and can verify it. That member is also in the United States along with myself.

Does that sound like an option for you? I'll wait for your reply before contacting the member if that's not something that works for you.