[mamorim01]

When installing a fresh copy of IRIX 6.5 from CD, and having just run fx to repartition the hard drive, has anyone run into an issue where the diagnostic tools (IDE) keep being triggered (instead of the installation tools) upon each restart preventing the system installation from taking place?

Upon reboot from exiting the partition tool (which is carried out successfully with no errors, so both the CD-ROM and hard disk are operational) I start the installation process from the PROM menu ("Option 2 - Install System Software"), select CD-ROM (with installation disc #1 inside) and then IDE starts with the diagnostic tests being carried out and completed successfully. The tests do complete and I am dropped to an "ide>>" prompt from where I can only exit, which throws me back to the PROM menu where the process starts all over again. Any other options at the PROM menu such as "Option 4 - Recover System" yield the same results.

I have installed IRIX many times in the past and only ran into this occurrence once on an Indigo 2. It was a very long time ago and I cannot for the life of me remember how I managed to clear the error (I think I ended up swapping the hard disk for a newer model??). I just ran into this same situation on an O2 which I am attempting to restore, and I am stuck once again.

As you well know IRIX should, upon selecting Option 2 at the PROM menu, copy the installation files from the CD-ROM to the hard drive and reboot once again so as to take the installation from there. Can anyone possibly share some light into why this is not happening? It looks as if there was a flag set somewhere indicating that the diagnostic tools should be ran prior to installation, but seeing as no errors are shown at IDE, how would one unset this flag? :huh:

Cheers,

[gijoe77]

seems odd - can you perhaps do a resetenv in PROM and see if that fixes anything? I had an Octane once that always did some sort of diagnostics on bootup, I thought that was something in the PROM but never really dug any further since it was a Production Flame/Smoke system and I didn't want to mess with it too much

[mamorim01]

Thanks for the suggestion, it is indeed quite odd. Unfortunately, resetting parameters did not seem to help, either. I have removed both the hard disk and the CD-ROM for cleaning as I am working on refurbishing the machine, and will try again tomorrow using a new approach. I have just received a new 36GB drive which I intended to use for other purposes, and I will try to restart the process from scratch using this drive. My gut feeling is that something went wrong with the repartition process when using fx and the partition table is either scrambled or not properly set. For what it is worth, I just plugged the old drive in an Octane and initialized it from within IRIX and it seems to work wonders, so it is not as if it was phisically damaged.

[BrainStorm]

Is the disk 'blessed'? i.e., is the label correct? I've had SGI and Sun machines even have disk label issues with the factory drive. For that matter even had the issue on Pre-Rhapsody Macs.

[mamorim01]

I do believe it was properly sync'd. I followed the procedure a few times, the last time with a copy at hand to make sure I was not missing any steps, and no errors were shown on screen before exiting fx and rebooting. Now, as for whether the label was physically written, I could not possibly confirm because I do suspect a problem with fx somewhere.

[mamorim01]

For what it is worth, I tried installing on a different drive and it went through on the first try. The old drive is happily installed in the Octane and working just fine after having been initialized from within IRIX.