The HD on my indigo2 is dead, and I need suggestions to look for to replace it. Are the sled/caddies specific to a type of drive, or can I put any compatible drive in it.
Thanks for the help.
Brian
An Indigo 2 will work just fine with any standard 50 pin SCSI hard drive. It should also work with other types of SCSI hard drives with an adapter. The sled system is pretty much the same as the Indigos so you should have enough room for a small adapter if you wanted to go with SCA (that is what I'm using in my Indy and I had one in my Indigo at one point).
Most people these days recommend going the adapter route because you can get larger drives in the SCA configuration.
However, I did buy a lot of 5 SCA drives off of ebay and subsequently found that the specific drive type I bought doesn't work with the adapters.
Unfortunately, the 50 pin drives are getting old and are becomming harder to find. Most of them will end up being 4 Gig Seagate Baracudas that are full-height drives. These will fit the caddy in your Indigo2, but wouldn't fit in an Indy.
When we get together so I can give you your mice, I can certainly set you up with a SCA to 50-pin or 80-pin adapter if you need one. I think I have an extra one.
Quote from: "Ashman"Unfortunately, the 50 pin drives are getting old and are becomming harder to find. Most of them will end up being 4 Gig Seagate Baracudas that are full-height drives. These will fit the caddy in your Indigo2, but wouldn't fit in an Indy.
I bought two 50 pin Baracudas within the last week or two, I got a 18gb 18XL and a 36ES2 which is 19gb iirc.
I use the favorite search function of eBay for the term "seagate scsi" and I get it every day. I got the two last drives using this, one was best offer which I got for 15 pounds and the 18XL was 7.5 pounds. The 18XL is a great drive it's basically a 7200rpm Cheetah. I've got a 9gb one in the cube.
How about these disks? They are only 4.5G, but also only $8 ($16 with shipping). I would need an adapter, as it is a SCA drive, but I think I know where one of those is. ;)
http://cgi.ebay.com/New-Quantum-4-5G-HDDs-P-N-PX04J011-Viking-II_W0QQitemZ9733885542QQihZ008QQcategoryZ11223QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item9733885542Chef
Got and adapter from ashman, and am trying to install the new drive, but have a few questions.
The system is an Indigo2 IP22, 200Mhz-R4400, 128M, GR3-Elan graphics. The 5.25 bay has a Toshiba XM-3501B CD-rom, the top 3.5 bay has an Insite "floptical", and bottom bay had the bad Quantum Hard disk. I removed the HD sled and am trying to replace the drive with a Seagate Barracuda ST23550wc. I made sure the drive jumpers were set to "ID0" and motor start enabled (not delayed). On the adapter board itself, what should I set the id to? I have tried all the options, but still get scsi errors on boot. What would the default ID be for a hard disk installed in that bay? Is the Id set by the bay, or does the system dynamically set them on boot? Do the bays have to be filled in a specific order for things to work correctly?
Any thoughts or info on this is greatly appreciated.
Chef
I am getting an "timeout after 2 sec." error now on ID1, which should be the hard disk. Have I killed the Baraacuda? The green light comes on, and it spins up fine, but still get the scsi errors. It is not making any funny noises, or any "click, click, click of death" type sounds that shows obvious problems. Will have to see if I have another hd around here that I can try.
Chef
The only other drive I have available is an old ~400M seagate (sti480n), which I do not think would work, and would be too small to be practical. What would be a good drive to look for. It does not have to be a large drive, just enough to comfortably install 6.5 on.
Any suggestions?
Chef
Quote from: "nextchef"I made sure the drive jumpers were set to "ID0" and motor start enabled (not delayed). On the adapter board itself, what should I set the id to? I have tried all the options, but still get scsi errors on boot. What would the default ID be for a hard disk installed in that bay? Is the Id set by the bay, or does the system dynamically set them on boot? Do the bays have to be filled in a specific order for things to work correctly?
:? Ummm... dynamically? We are talking about an Indigo 2 (two
SCSI buses)... SCSI does nothing
dynamically.
You have an internal bus and an external bus... the internal bus controller has a "0" designation while the external bus should be "1" on your system. The root device (your hard drive) should be given SCSI ID
1. Your CD-ROM drive should be given SCSI ID
4 (this is the default for an Indigo 2). Bays don't matter... but the bus does.
In this setup, you would stop the boot process at the console, and give your system a boot command of:
boot -f dksc(0,4,8)sashARCS dksc(0,4,7)stand/fx.ARCS --x[/list]It also doesn't sound like you are stopping at the console, and are letting the system attempt to boot from the default root device (which should be at SCSI ID "1" which is most likely what that error was)... which is
not what you want to do if you have a new drive and are installing IRIX from scratch. The start up GUI on all SGIs gives you options, including stopping at the console, rather than continuing with the normal startup sequence.
Honestly, it sounds like you are
over thinking the drive stuff too. Other than setting the SCSI ID to "1", you should not have had to
change anything on the drive (where did you get the idea to change anything else?)... the fact that you have, is most likely your problem with the drive. Leave it factory default (basically, exactly how you got it), set the SCSI ID, and just let your system do what it was designed to do... run.
Similarly, you shouldn't need an absolutely specific (down to the serial number, manufacture date, etc.) drive to get this system running... it needs a SCSI drive, that is pretty much all.
These aren't that different from Suns (though Sun wants to see the root drive at ID 3 and the CD-ROM at ID 6), and hopefully you didn't play with the drive on your Suns to get them working. SCSI is pretty simple... you can safely pick between 1 and 6 for IDs, some systems like certain IDs for certain devices, and don't double up on IDs on the same bus.
My Indy is using
some SCA 9.1 GB drive... it really didn't matter, as long as it was a SCSI drive (and I think it may be the same type as either the one in my Quadra 950 or the one in my 8600). Same with my Indigos... I just put a couple SCSI drives in them and they were good to go. When I got this Sun I'm working with, I happened to have an old Apple 2 GB SCSI drive sitting within arms reach, and that was what went into the system. Other than looking up (if it wasn't on the drive itself) how to set the SCSI ID, I did nothing else to any of these drives (and actually I think the SCSI ID was set on the adapter on my SCA drives).
Once you get all your devices on the correct buses with unique IDs, you should be good to go with following the instructions included with the 6.5 installation media. The booklet tells you the few commands you need to know. I, personally, gave my system a 512 MB scratch partition (I have 128 MB of RAM), though IRIX can use space on the main partition (I've noticed my systems run much faster when given a unique scratch partition).
And if you aren't completely sure of what devices have which IDs, run
hinv -v from the console before booting from the install CD. You'll get a list of the hardware you have, and the addresses of SCSI devices. If you have every thing set up right, part of what should be displayed should look like this:
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision D
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version WD33C93B, revision D
But you would also have your floptical in the controller 0 list (with what ever ID it is using). For example my Indy (which only has one SCSI bus) displays:
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C936, revision D
Disk drive / removable media: unit 5 on SCSI controller 0
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
CDROM: unit 6 on SCSI controller 0
Note that I use the same (external) CD-ROM drive for both my SGIs and Suns... and Suns are more picky about the CD-ROM drive's address so I keep mine at "6". The device with ID "5" is my Zip drive on my Indy.
My point about dynamically was referring to the 6 "pin" connector block that is part of the drive sled. On the old drive, it was attached to the first three set of jumpers that the drive label says are used to set the scsi id. As I saw no jumpers or switch on the drive sled to set the scsi id, I guessed that the system or backplane must set the drives id, through that connector. I tried attaching it to the corresponding pins on the adapter board, hoping it would do the same thing.
So then it should have worked the first time, as the only thing I changed was to disable the delayed start, which was the default for the drive in the sun external enclosure. I got that info from a thread on an SGI specific forum that Ashman made me aware of. When I first put the drive in, it was not spinning up at boot because the jumper on the drive was set to "delayed start". Once I changed it, the drive would spin up at boot as expected.
All the drives are internal, so they would be on the same internal scsi bus. On my system, if I interrupt the boot and run hinv, all non used scsi id's on the internal bus are identified as a "cdrom" device. If i install the hard drive (set to id 1) along with the cdrom, it shows up as 1, and all other id's appear as cdrom drives. The cdrom does work, as I was able to run the diagnostics off of an IRIX cd. If I remove the cdrom, and leave the hard disk in, the HD shows up as the only device, with whatever id I have set the adapter to use. I did try with just the HD in, and an external sun cdrom attached, and then hinv displayed something similar to what you describe. I was still getting a few timeout errors for the drive at boot, but not enough to get the "diagnostic failed, check cables ..." message. I then selected the install option from the gui menu, and selected the cdrom containing the IRIX disk. The disk whirred, and the activity light blinked, but it never started and gave an error about boot blocks or something. At this point it was time to leave, so I turned everything off, thinking I would try again later. I needed to get my IRIX 6 disks from home anyway, as the one I was using to test was a 5.x version that came in the cdrom drive of the system.
Chef
Quote from: "nextchef"I got that info from a thread on an SGI specific forum that Ashman made me aware of.
What forum did you go to?
The only one I know of is Nekochan.net's forum. I've been a member there since some time back in 2003 and hadn't really thought about the fact that there could be others out there.
Was this where you got the suggestion about using ID "0" for the root drive? I've seen other ID numbers used for root drives on SGIs, but never "0" before. I seem to recall reading somewhere not to use that ID... though I can't recall where off hand as it would have been back in 1999 when I got my first SGI. It may have been in one of my SGI admin manuals though (I moved all those down to storage so I would have room for my math texts). :?
Just out of curiosity, was the Barracuda a Compaq ROMed drive? A ton of older Compaq drives, mostly OEMed by Seagate were released on the surplus market a year or so ago. Compaq flashed the drives with custom firmware and locked the drive to prevent it from being flashed. Seagate factory technicians know how to unlock the drive and flash it with standard firmware but none of the three ex-Seagate people I talked to would release the unlock code to me. Two have offered to reflash my drives but their fee was between $10 and $30 per drive. That kind of defeats the purpose of buying surplus drives for older equipment.
Also RacerX is right. Unlike PeeCee's the SCSI controller on Sgi boxes sits on SCSI ID "0". Make your boot drive SCSI ID "1".
Quote from: "RacerX"Quote from: "nextchef"I got that info from a thread on an SGI specific forum that Ashman made me aware of.
What forum did you go to?
The only one I know of is Nekochan.net's forum. I've been a member there since some time back in 2003 and hadn't really thought about the fact that there could be others out there.
Was this where you got the suggestion about using ID "0" for the root drive? I've seen other ID numbers used for root drives on SGIs, but never "0" before. I seem to recall reading somewhere not to use that ID... though I can't recall where off hand as it would have been back in 1999 when I got my first SGI. It may have been in one of my SGI admin manuals though (I moved all those down to storage so I would have room for my math texts). :?
ID 0 on the adapter actually corresponds to SCSI ID 1. The whole "starting with zero" counting thing, I guess. Very confusing unless everyone is counting the same way.
And it was on nekochan, btw.
Chef
Quote from: "blackcube"Just out of curiosity, was the Barracuda a Compaq ROMed drive? A ton of older Compaq drives, mostly OEMed by Seagate were released on the surplus market a year or so ago.
It was out of a Sun external enclosure, but I am not sure if it was original or not. The drive used to work, as I had it attached to one of my SS5's about a year ago. I was not using it currently, and I needed a drive so out it went.
Chef
I got a disk that should work for this, installed it, and ran the command RacerX suggested in order to get in initialized properly, now I need to install. I have a 5 disk set that is marked IRIX 6.5 that came with my O2, and a single 5.3 disk that was in this Indigo2 when I got it. I have listed the disks I have below, and what each says.
IRIX 5.3 inst(filesystem)
IRIX 6.5 Installation
IRIX 6.5 Foundation 1
IRIX 6.5 Foundation 2
IRIX 6.5 Apps
IRIX 6.5 ONL3/NFS
I tried starting with the 6.5 installation disk, and let it do its part until it asked for another disk. I then inserted the Foundation1 disk, but when I try to install from it, it gives me dependency problems, and does not continue. What is the proper procedure to follow to get this installed? Do I have enough disks to do a proper install?
Chef
EDIT:
Found this link on google, so will give it a try since it seems to be a very comprehensive guide.
http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/6.5inst.html
Quote from: "nextchef"I got a disk that should work for this, installed it, and ran the command RacerX suggested in order to get in initialized properly, now I need to install. I have a 5 disk set that is marked IRIX 6.5 that came with my O2, and a single 5.3 disk that was in this Indigo2 when I got it. I have listed the disks I have below, and what each says.
IRIX 5.3 inst(filesystem)
IRIX 6.5 Installation
IRIX 6.5 Foundation 1
IRIX 6.5 Foundation 2
IRIX 6.5 Apps
IRIX 6.5 ONL3/NFS
I tried starting with the 6.5 installation disk, and let it do its part until it asked for another disk. I then inserted the Foundation1 disk, but when I try to install from it, it gives me dependency problems, and does not continue. What is the proper procedure to follow to get this installed? Do I have enough disks to do a proper install?
Chef
EDIT:
Found this link on google, so will give it a try since it seems to be a very comprehensive guide.
http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/6.5inst.html
You've found the best SGI reference on the 'net anywhere, Ian Mapleson's SGI site is fantastic and he's put a hell of a lot of work into that. If you get stuck send him an email, he's such a nice helpful guy. He used to admin the SGI/computer lab at our local university before he moved to Scotland. He's also cool to buy stuff off, I got an Octane drive sled and bought Irix off him.
Did the Irix install stop or carry on?, IIRC Irix does give a lot of errors during the install. Remember also Irix 6.5.22 is the latest one that will work on an Indigo 2, you can download it FOC from SGI.
Ian's site is (and has been since back in the late 90's) considered one of the best references on the web. Before I start pulling manuals off the shelf or hit
SGI's Techpubs Library (
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi) I'll go to Ian's site to see if he has addressed the issue.
Back when I got my first SGI (around 1999) there were as many as four mirrors of Ian's site as I recall (tells you how important it was even back then). Sadly, as the community has shrunk the number of mirrors as slowly dropped. Usually within a week of one of the mirrors closing down you'll see people frantically posting asking what happened to Ian's site (to which they would be pointed at another mirror).
I think there are only two left now...
futuretech.blinkenlights.nl (
http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/sgi.html)
vintagecomputers.info (
http://vintagecomputers.info/sgi.html)[/list]I've downloaded most of Ian's pages relating to Indigo/Indy/Indigo2 hardware and IRIX 5.3/6.2/6.5... just to be on the safe side, and because they are great references even if I don't have access to the net at any given time (specially back when I still had clients using that hardware for RIP servers).
Chef, if this is the first time that you've come across Ian's site, then I highly suggest spending some time reading the articles in his
Indigo2 section (
http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/indigo2/).
I may grab an Indigo2 this weekend... more because I like the model than that I have an actual use for it at this point Really, an O2 with the full AV option would be the upgrade path from my Indy which has the Indy Video and Cosmo Compression boards in it. Until I get the IRIX 6.5 media I won't be getting an O2... but both the 5.3 and 6.2 media I own cover most of the Indigo2 models.
Sadly, I missed out on a really nice R8000 system a little over a year ago. :(
Followed the directions on the site, and got it installed successfully. You are both right about it being a great site, with lots of "real world" info and what to watch out for. Now just need to poke around on sgi and find the latest patches and updates for IRIX.
Chef
Quote from: "nextchef"Now just need to poke around on sgi and find the latest patches and updates for IRIX.
Time to get the credit card out then, SGI have a very unique view on support, you'll be able to download 6.5.22 FOC but that's about it.
Quote from: "brams"Quote from: "nextchef"Now just need to poke around on sgi and find the latest patches and updates for IRIX.
Time to get the credit card out then, SGI have a very unique view on support, you'll be able to download 6.5.22 FOC but that's about it.
So I see. At least I can download some security updates, which is better than nothing.
Chef
Note that the the Indigo2, Indy, and older models aren't supported at all in the last several IRIX releases (maybe starting with 6.5.25?). Anyway, all the software built by the active folks on Nekochan.net is for 6.5.21, though much of it is for mips4 architecture only (O2, R10k Indigo2, and Octane).
I'd have to check my notes at home but I thought that on the I^2, the SCSI ID for the internal bays is set by the drive sled... And yup, I too have several SCA drives in use on older machines using 50-pin <-> SCA adapters.
Cheers,
crimsonRE (which gives you a clue about my SGI proclivities)
Quote from: "crimsonRE"Note that the the Indigo2, Indy, and older models aren't supported at all in the last several IRIX releases (maybe starting with 6.5.25?). Anyway, all the software built by the active folks on Nekochan.net is for 6.5.21, though much of it is for mips4 architecture only (O2, R10k Indigo2, and Octane).
This one is an R4400-200Mhz, but I also have an O2 at home that came with IRIX installed. How do you tell which revision of IRIX is installed? I have tried uname -r and even uname -a, but all it gives is IRIX 6.5 and no more. I think the cd's are 6.5.22, but it would be nice to confirm that before downloading and installing more software.
Chef
Searching for 'uname' in
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/browse.cgi?coll=0650&db=mantells me that uname -Ra will give you the extended release, e.g., 6.5.x
Cheers,
crimsonRE