[Trantor]

Hello guys, nice to know that there is some place on the net where people can talk about this machines! 
I fell in love with Silicon Graphics from the first moment I sat in front of an Indy in '96. I was chosen to be the one that could do his final high school project at the IT office of Elsag/Bailey... nothing fancy, but after a couple of days where I was programming some network utilities on a pc, the office manager saw me and asked what I was doing here. The moment I spelled the work "network" he stopped me and said something like: "So why the heck they put you on that machine? Tell Graziano to make you and account on the Unix one!". Well the Unix machine was the Indy and it was a mindblowing experience... I've had used *nix before first on a dumb terminal at school and later in '95 my first linux versions (I think one of the first slackware distributed on 2 cdroms)... nothing was nearly comparable to what I saw on the Indy!
They told me: "here is your account, change the password when you log in, the machine is a high specced one, so don't blow it up. Ah you have internet (I think it was a 1 mbit connection), please don't fill too much the hard disk with p0rn pictures... as we've already other machines devoted to that." 
Well, think of a 17 years old little nerd that can freely use (later even with administrative account) such a machine for his last high school year 1 full day a week in place of a full school day... it was like winning the national lottery 

Jumping forward to 2018, I've just found an Indigo 2 that needs some love to make it work again. I think I will need to install a fresh copy of Irix on it (I have somewhere some Irix 5.something cds), but since I don't yet have it with me I don't even know if it's equipped with a cdrom. I will surely need some help in giving again some life to her. After that I will use her as my cross-development machine for other retro machines (I think mainly for the c64 and other 8 bit machines). I will need to make some simple ports and maybe make some new tools, but I think it will be a nice way to develop on retro machines 
While I wait to have her in my hands, you have some advices on what to check before trying to power her up for the first time?

[dexter1]

Welcome!

Start with getting a minidin-8 to db-9 serial cable and a nullmodem cable so you can talk to the Indigo2 via the serial console.
Indigo2 systems are solid machines, except for the Power Supply from an Impact system, they can become non-functional after a while.
Opening the hood to work on the interior takes care. if it has a front flap, gently open it to reveal two tabs. the tabs should be bent slightly downwards to release the flap, but you only need minimal pressure. If you have the flap removed you can open the hood by pressing the two lock buttons upward, lift the front until the hood is 45 degrees, then push it back to slide the tabs on the back out of the steel chassis. The video from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2swW5JesE shows the procedure

[gijoe77]

Welcome and congrats on the Indigo2 acquisition! Keep us posted on the condition and specs when it arrives.

I don't think having a CDROM will be a requirement to install IRIX, you might be able to do it over the network, see https://forums.irix.cc/thread-451.html.

For my indigo2 I stuck this drive https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-412751-016-3...2877971743 into it with the assistance of a 50pin to 80pin SCA adapter https://www.ebay.com/itm/SCSI-SCA-80-PIN...2227557176

your looking at 10MB/sec max SCSI speeds, but I tested out the SD2SCSI speeds and it wasn't really usable for IRIX 6.5. SD2SCSI was perfectly doable for IRIX 5.3, but you would really have to have a specific need to run IRIX 5.3, specifically to run some sort of software that didn't work in IRIX 6.5

[Raion]

Welcome to the forums dude. I'm the boss here, so if you need anything.

[Trantor]

Ok guys thanks for your advices!
I've started searching things to put into my future Indigo2 at work (we have a lot of old things lying around). My first finding is a 80 to 50 adapter:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x0y3lrjk2xsm5x...3.jpg?dl=0

I think that it should be a good one, right? I should also have a small batch of 18giga compaq scsi hd taken out of a server that I can try to use along with a block of scsi cdrom readers (mostly plextor) that I can try to use to make the Irix install in the simpler way.

I would also like to ask: what kind of rams can be used in for expanding the Indigo2?

Ah btw, while searching for old hardware and asking people at work, I've found an Indigo2 IMPACT... well at least its "skeleton", because it has been predated by all of the interesting stuffs many years ago :-/

[dexter1]

I would also like to ask: what kind of rams can be used in for expanding the Indigo2?

60 or 70 ns FastPage (not EDO!) 72pins true Parity SIMM's with golden contacts.

You need to fill one memory bank with 4 identical SIMM's, so f.i. 4x32MB which makes it 128MB per bank. This is the maximum bank size for Pre-Impact Indigo2 so total memory would be 384MB maximum.
R10000 Impact Indigo2 system support 512MB for one bank, making the maximum memory configuration 1 GB.

[Trantor]

The baby is at her new home :-)
The external plastics of the case are not in very good shape, but the system is booting and can go in maintenance mode. This are the specs:

Code:

SGI Version 6.2 IP22 IDE field Mar 5, 1997

System: IP22
Processor: 150 Mhz R4400, with FPU
Primary I-cache size: 16 Kbytes
Primary D-cache size: 16 Kbytes
Secondary cache size: 1024 Kbytes
Memory size: 128 Mbytes
Graphics: GR3-Elan
SCSI Disk: scsi(0)disk(3)

I plan to change pretty soon the hd with something bigger and faster (she came with an 8 giga ibm drive), but for now I just want to play with her as is to get some degree of familiarity with the system. Of course the Irix install is somewhat broken, as it panicks on boot.
Do you think I have to try to recover the original installation or simply go straight to netinstall of the lastest irix version?

[gijoe77]

I would get a new disk and do a netinstall of IRIX 6.5.22m. Too many unkowns with a OS disk that panics at boot. Once you get a proper install you can circle back and see what's going on with the suspect disk.

[Trantor]

As suggested I've put the new 18giga 10k rpm hd into the indigo2. I've downloaded disc1, disc2, disc3 ... tar.gz and extracted into the boot vm.
After that I've started the indigo2 and formatted the hd (phew really a looong operation :o ).
When I finally go to the "Install System Software" and select remote directory I put the vm ip address, the remote directory (/disc1/dist) and it seems to start downloading the miniroot from the vm. From now on strange things starts to happen.
Sometimes I receive a message like this:

Code:

Settings $netaddr to 192.168.1.24 (from server )
It appears that a miniroot install failed. Either the system is
misconfigured or a previous installation failed.
If you think the miniroot is still valid, you may continue booting
using the current miniroot image. If you are unsure about the
current state of the miniroot, you can reload a new miniroot image.
You may abort the installation and return to the menu, or you can
fix (reset to normal) the miniroot install state
See the 'Software Installation Guide' chapter of Troubleshooting for
more information.

I then press 'r' and it appears that the miniroot starts to download from the network (I see the progress bar going all through 100%). After that all I get is this error screen:

Code:

Unable to execute network(0)bootp()192.168.1.13:/disc1/dist/miniroot/unix.IP22: invalid argument
Unable to load network(0)bootp()192.168.1.13:/disc1/dist/miniroot/unix.IP22: ``network(0)bootp()192.168.1.13:/disc1/dist/miniroot/unix.IP22'' is not a valid file to boot.
Failed to boot

Is there something that I'm doing wrong?

[Trantor]

Ok this morning (or it was late night? who knows! ) I've managed to solve the problem and finished the Irix install procedure!
Say hello to my new Indigo2