Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Hi

I feel somewhat stupid, but this is actually my first time trying to install IRIX, so be nice

I have a teal Indigo2 R4400 300Mhz with Extreme graphics. I want to install IRIX using a 6.5.22 overlay set and the 6.5 base set using the serial console. When I first booted and selected "2. Install system software" and selected the local CDROM it complained about a missing system on partition 8. I figured the disk had some junk on it and cleared its partition table on a PC. When I try again I get an error about missing partitions on the disk. I think the CD is good since I could use it to clear a root password on another IRIX system.

What am I missing?

How exactly? A PC's partition table is totally different to IRIX. Seeing as you are using a serial console (well done) can you dump the output from the startup?

Are you able to start a miniroot, sash or fx?

I just used cfdisk under Linux. It complains about an unkown partition table format and ask if I want to start from scratch, to which I answer yes and then writes the empty table to disk.

It's hooked up to a vt320 now, I'll hook it up to something else tomorrow and dump the whole thing.

Nope. Unsure how I would do that though, can I do it from the monitor?

This should get you there <it includes instructions on preparing the disk for use with IRIX from within the PROM>: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/6.5inst.html Be sure to write the new label to the disk <sync in fx-speak>, that one seems to have been a semi-frequent gotcha.

Here are some additional PROM references:
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... at1/prom.z
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... /ch09.html

the man page for the SGI disk utility <fx>: http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... /cat1/fx.z

and the Disks and Filesystems chapter from the IRIX Admin book: http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... /ch02.html

Recondas covered the how but the why is that when you select "install system tools", one of the first steps is the installation needs to copy several things to disk. And if the disk isn't set up properly beforehand it can't copy things over.


FX is not hard... r,ro,yes,yes,..,l,sy,/exit
takes 30 seconds.

The "how" has been covered fairly well, but if anyone's interested in the "why" here it is:

The IRIX installation system hasn't been updated in a long while - it's very old-school UNIX, derived from the days when software came on tape. Because of that, there was no way to "boot" off of it, so accommodations had to be made. For older UNIXes the answer was the miniroot, a bootable, generic, small-but-complete-enough filesystem that could be block-copied to a disk in the partition that would later become the swap. This begat other problems, mainly this one: "how do I know what the swap partition is if the disk isn't labeled?"

The answer to this is to have an even smaller UNIX implementation (Sun's MUNIX) or standalone disk tools (SGI's fx or Apollo's SAUs) that can run entirely from the memory and label a disk (well, not the only way - you can require that people buy pre-labeled disks from you at horrendous markups, but that fell out of favor real fast).

Since that time, with the introduction of CD-ROMs and machines with crazy amounts of memory (64MB+), many implementations have gone to install process that's more like a "live CD", where the read-only filesystem is mounted from a CD and stuff copied over to memory as needed (e.g. modern Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, AIX, Linux, xBSD). Much easier, but couldn't be done on 1987 machines with QIC drives.

Thanks for the answers. I read up on the links from recondas post and my problem was indeed the "junk" on the disk. By following the instructions on Ian's page allowed me to repartition the disk (just like sybfreq describes) and do an install (actually it is running right now)

I ran into a snag, I got the same error as in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=15190

When I booted the 6.5.22 installation tools CD. I then switched to a 6.5 1998 June Install CD and it worked like a charm. I thought the Indigo2 with R4400 should be able to run 6.5.22? Do I need to boot a specific version of sash (i.e. not the one that ends in 64) for that to work ?

R4400s use the 32-bit version (sashARCS) instead of the 64 bit version (sash64).

The one exception to this is the Crimson, which uses the older style naming (sash.IP17)

...though if you've already installed an earlier version of 6.5 on the machine, you can update directly to 6.5.22 via a "live" installation without having to boot from installation media. Just be sure to install patch 5086 first. If you don't already have the patch, it is freely downloadable from http://support.sgi.com/

For full set of patches for Indigo2 post 6.5.22, refer to

http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=16718025&p=7276665&hilit=rollup#p7276665

and look for references to 5910