[ha0124]

Hi guys

I've got two racks containing 3x Origin 2000 and 1x 2400 and two drive arrays that are sitting on display at the Center for Computing History in Cambridge, England, that I've been trying to get up and running.

So far I've had to replace both PSUs in the front panel display units in the rear (the ones with AMD 486DX4 machines in) and now have the front panels lighting up. I've also had to replace a couple of the fans in the bottom of one of the 4 units as they were dead and causing an error.

All four units power on and start running though their checks, displaying various hex codes for each CPU card on the displays, however 3 of the cards then stop, and show the led code for CPU disabled on the rear.

By removing these cards from the rack, I can get the machine to the point of displaying PO M0 -> P0M3 and get get the CrayLink lights to all show green,

However it does not seem to want to go any further than that. I know some of the HDD's are faulty, so I'm not expecting it to boot from them, but I have tried with an IRIX CD in borth of the drives (only 2 of the 4 units have CD drives in) but it does not seem to want to boot from them.

Obviously this machine does not have a graphics card in, but according to the books it should output a text display on the TTY ports on the rear, I've not been able to get anything up using a null modem cable to a PC - although this may be because I don't have the correct serial settings in the terminal program i'm using as the SGI book does not list them!

We are hoping to get this machine up and running as part of a conservation project at the museum, and to have it available to be powered up regularly.

I have to admit that this is the first time I have ever worked on an SGI machine of this size, and have been basically just going by the manuals etc.
Hopefully somebody out there has some experience in getting these type of machines up and running and installed. Once I have it up and running to the IRIX prompt with an IP address I can connect into then I should be fine, but at present I'm at a bit of a loss as to what needs to happen next to get it to load up.

Thanks in advance!

[dexter1]

Hi and welcome to our corner of vintage stuff

Most SGI's should be happy with serial port settings of 9600 bps, 8 data bits, No parity and 1 stop bit.
There are several serial ports on an O2000, use the first serial port on the base panel.

If the O2000 boots it should display PROM output performing self checks

[ha0124]

Thanka for the info. I suspect the issue was not having the stop bit. By the base unit I'm assuming this means the unit showing P0M0 on the led screens on the front?

[dexter1]

Thanka for the info. I suspect the issue was not having the stop bit. By the base unit I'm assuming this means the unit showing P0M0 on the led screens on the front?

No, that is the system controller (i think it was called that, my last O2000 left my hands a year ago) . The base unit is located on the back and is the big rectangle box, see figure 2 in https://techpubs.jurassic.nl/manuals/hdw.../pr01.html

[ha0124]

Yes thats the port I ment, but I have 4 of them, one in each module (each module has 4 nodes) I guessing I use the one in Module 0?

[dexter1]

Module 0 should be the module which starts first as master: On older O200 systems the master/slave setting would be set with dip-switches, but i guess the system controller on the o2k will decide who is going to be master.

You should get output fairly immediately, but the memory check will take quite some time. If you don't see output within a minute, try other ports on other modules.

[ha0124]

Cheers, yes on the 2000 they all start up at the same time, and seem to be assigned module numbers which get displayed on the module diag screen after the mem test.

I'll give it a go on those port settings. It's obviously doing something and probably getting to a point where it needs input to tell it to bot from the CD drive I'm guessing.

[ha0124]

Cheers. I'm now in to the system and can get onto command console.

However when I'm trying to install Irix, I'm getting an error comming up saying

Root device /hw not avalible - reboot and try again.

[dexter1]

So are there disks inside the cabinet? Maybe a hinv will show the system contents including scsi devices.

It's possible the root device environment variable points to a disk or raid volume which is no longer there.
Look at 'printenv', it will tell you all the PROM variables which are set by a previous installation including partitions it look for IRIX root filesystems.

You probably need a new install on a new disk, since you're not sure if the disks are all functioning. IRIX is not able to boot from CDROM, but it is possible to start what we call a 'miniroot' environment where you can install IRIX, but also administer it and view file system contents.

Also, you can start 'fx' which can partition, relabel and test drives.

Read Ian's write-up for installing IRIX 6.5 : http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/6.5inst.html

[ha0124]

I can get into fx from the console using the boot command as described in the install instructions and partition both 0,1,0 and 1,1,0 without a problem.

It's when I go back and start up using option 2 Install System Software that it then errors out as can't find the root partition.

I have three enviroment vars set that seem to be of

SystemPartition dksk(0,1,0)

OSLoadPartition dksk(1,1,0)

Root dksk(0,1,0)

When it starts up it copies the cd data over to 1,1,0 and then tries to mount the same drive as /root.

I have tried many variations of the above on different drives.

When i go into the shell and look in dev/dsk i can only ever see the controller it has copied the cd over too not the other one