Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

I bought an IRIS Indigo a while back, and have attempted to install irix on it, however Ive gotten stuck and am not sure how to proceed.
I ran through the entire irix install, it took about 45 minutes, however the machine does not boot, it says that no media is loaded.

Im not sure what to do from here, any help would be appreciated. Attached are some pictures showing hinv, partition info, and the media not loaded message.

Well, just to get started the fact that the kernel file "unix" isn't in the root directory of the filesystem means that somehow the installation skipped that step, or probably many steps. Much as I hate to say it that's a clear-cut case calling for an installation do-over...

This will be the third or fourth time i have reinstalled. 45 minutes of swapping out disks, then the reboot, and the files are nowhere to be found.
I must be leaving something out. know of anything i could be doing / not doing that would cause this?

Ive followed this install guide to the letter. http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/6.5inst.html

did you have any conflicts before starting the installation and if so how did you resolve them?

Yeah, 2 items, they didnt appear to be anything major. I can run the install again to get the exact details.

Something to do with the cosmo player. I used the command "remove conflicting" to tell it not to install those 2 particular packages before starting the install.
Also I couldn't tell weather to be on the maintenance stream or the feature stream. I chose the feature stream.

^^ Why is your system looking for //unix ? It's been five or six years since I've done an install but almost sure it should be looking for /unix ?

Somewhere in the environment settings you can change where the system looks for /unix, I'm pretty sure. I would do a <printenv> in the prom and check everything out thoroughly. Then maybe a < resetenv > just for good measure. You don't have anything customized yet, so no settings to lose and it's always good to start off from stock.

Yah but he did ls from the root of the filesystem and "unix" wasn't there. In fact, almost nothing was there, all it showed was sgilabel ide and sash, I don't know that much about sash, is that a virtual filesystem and "unix" isn't there because the real filesystem hasn't been mounted yet? Because if that's the case then the fact that "unix" isn't there is likely not the problem...

sgilabel, ide and sash are on the volume header. From the sash prompt he should to see what is on the partition (0) that the system is trying to boot from.

Another thing that would help is a printout of the results from the PROM "printenv" command. Note that on Indigo "resetenv" does not reset all of the NVRAM variables so you can't rely on just running that.

Other important info: what version of IRIX? 6.5.___. There was a change in the filesystem to XFSv2 during the IRIX 6.5 era, and if you have a mix of tools for some reason (some base 6.5 tools, other later tools) you may have problems.

Two of my install disks were bad. In the middle of the install there were a bunch of scsi errors, they were getting pushed out of the way buy the packages being installed, so i didnt notice first few times around.
I burned a copy of the 2 disks, and sure enough, this time around the install took a bit longer, and im greeted with the IRIX login screen after startup. Thanks for the help.

Which lends yet more credence to the oft-repeated speculation that the SGI installer was made obtuse by design in the hopes that it would increase the revenue stream coming from field service...

I doubt it - more likely is that it was made to run on a base 4MB 4D/60 back in 1987 with only the minimum required updates since then. Kind of like the way gendist was/is still single-threaded. Ever tried to install SunOS 3.x or other older systems? None are "intuitive".

How about Solaris 10 and the way it "helpfully" partitions your disk for you ? Aaaaaah !! (runs screaming from the room)

There's pain involved!

Slackware does kind of the same thing, the installer asks if and where you want to mount your disk's partitions, and you have to deliberately pick "do not format this partition," i.e. formatting all the partitions you choose to mount at boot is the default...

I won't argue that any installers from this era were intuitive. But I remember finding a very nice SunTools-based installer with GUI disk partitioning in a stray miniroot image on a Sun-2/150U that had been donated to my college - it was SunOS 3.x, can't be certain about the minor version. It was a damn sight easier to use that partitioning tool than the text-only stuff that was all I ever saw on SunOS 4, and I damn near fell out of my chair with outrage at all the hours I'd spent with that damned thing on workstation consoles when they had previously offered something clean and elegant.

Never did install SunOS 3.x from tape to bare drive. I should probably do that one of these days, just for kicks. (Potentially to the stomach... )

Same deal with the Linux command line partitioners, only once you finished partitioning you got to compound the joy by installing your distro of choice from a hundred and twenty floppies that you had laboriously downloaded and written out at work because no one had fast Internet at their houses back then...