Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Now I've finally managed to get my O2 working again (yay) it's time for me to fix some Octanes.

I have question though with some example.

I originally installed 6.5.15 and then 6.5.29 on my Octane and it was working well. Because the octane I got working was salvaged from a skip and a bit rusty I decided, I wanted to take one of the nice cleanly stored octanes I have, upgrade them to the dual 400 R12K and use that as the main machine.
Basicaly I swapped the dual 400 CPU onto the board in the clean machine, put extra memory in, the HDD from the old machine and tried to boot it up, but I never managed to get it to boot cleanly.

Correct me if I'm wrong but from what I remember a while back, when you install IRIX it upgrades the PROM if required.
Would I be correct in thinking that just swapping a HDD from installer machine to another would mean that the prom is out of date and probably won't work? Secondlly is there a way I can update the prom on a machine without a reinstall of IRIX (probably what I'm going to do in the end anyway)?

I also have the fun of working out which bits of memory work and which don't. I've got a stack of 1GB chips for octanes, but I've never managed to get a machine to be 8GB yet.

!m!

If you went from a MGRAS graphics system to a VPro graphics there is a good chance it won't boot because the original IRIX install was for MGRAS graphics and not VPro. I have some hard drives that will work with either MGRAS or VPro graphics board installed so I can swap out at will.

If original install was for a MGRAS equipped graphics board and later updated to a VPro graphics then your system should boot w/o any problems with either a MGRAS or VPro board installed.

The 887 mainboard max is 2 Gb of Ram whereas the 1467 mainboard will take 8Gb of Ram. Most of my Octanes run with 8Gb or Ram and I say most because I still keep an eye out for 1Gb sticks. The Ram is sometimes hard to obtain at a reasonable cost.

Although the PROM may be the problem I would first verify the graphics board installed.

Richard

It depends on where it's stopping. Is the problem in the PROM or in IRIX (does it give you the PROM menu or not?)

What was the original processor/IRIX combination in the Octane that provided the mainboard/drive? There are slight changes needed for the R12k, but those were included from IRIX 6.5.4 I believe, so it is very likely that support for R12k has been installed (though not guaranteed).

Having just been through this myself as a new Octane owner, I'd suggest a quick glance at the Troubleshooting section of the Octane Owner's Guide . The diagram at the beginning covers the basics of what to check if you aren't getting to the PROM monitor. You'd probably cover it all on your own anyway, but nice to have it laid out methodically.

Biggest other things I can think of are the mainboard and gfx compatibility quirks that richtom1 mentioned.