Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Finally got these paid off and picked up. Picked up 2 tezro's yesterday. One was shown to me to get to the main menu on an attached monitor before purchase. The other does not power on. says "l1 running" on the lcd and does not power on with the button.

Anyhow, the other one, that was shown to be working, is not starting up once i got it home. I can press the power button and see that it is booting to the prom on the lcd, however after a time I get a flashing red light , and it says "GFX CFG ERR"

something pertaining to the graphics card? I am using one of my old dell monitors, known to play nice with my octanes, although i have it connected via dvi because that is what the tezro has. The monitor should not be the problem right?

Any tips to get it going would be much appreciated. I kind of mis judged the size of them, so while they are not running that will give me time to find a bigger desk.

Do you have a keyboard/mouse connected? "GFX CFG ERR" will come up if it doesn't detect them.

That usually means that it doesn't see the monitor and keyboard/ mouse. The dell will be fine. Make sure everything is connected right and give it another go. It is rare, but I have seen the small interface board for the serial ports/KB/Mouse fail and give that error. If these got banged around during travel it is a good idea to open it up and seat the Dallas chip and any boards.

On the other system, connect a serial terminal to the console port and at the L1 prompt enter pwr u to turn it on. pwr d will turn it off. There is a small cable that goes to the front LCD and switches. I have seen this cause the no start problem as well as the small nipple breaking off of the back of the power button.

It is a bit of a task to get the front plastics off so be careful.

I have lots of spares for those systems so let me know if you need anything.

I thank you all for the helpful advise. I am going to get a bigger spot of my current desk cleaned off and look it over better, thanks.They both rode side by side wrapped in blankets, strapped down, in the back seat of a 4 door truck, i do not think that something getting bumped loose is the issue, however i will look into it. I will post back soon.


To mopar 5150 - do you have any spare front covers for the tezro? The part with the light up sgi logo. Mine is all torn and tattered. Has a big bubble in it too. Not too pretty. Probably the least of my worries at this point, but it is bugging me.

I should have something better than what you describe. I will have a look.

Let us know what you find on the start up issues. These are really pretty rugged machines so all should be good with a little effort.


If you need disassembly photos for the front plastics let me know.



On the other hand you could just give up now and I will take them off of your hands..

Enjoy!

Keyboard Was plugged into mouse port. That will do it.

Came right up. Ill try and get irix installed on it tonight.

I will post back with some pictures of the haul, i got a little more than expected. I filled the bed of the truck.

Just a thought, but on the Tezro I recently purchased, the computer was sold as L1 only powering up. It was a quad board machine advertised with only 2 sticks of ram. When it arrived, it had a single 512mb stick in bank 0 top & bottom. I swapped out the 512mb sticks with 1gb sticks, buttoned it back up and the machine immediately powered up. Machine is now happily running 6.5.30.

Tom

Heap of pictures to follow. No real good pictures of the tezro's yet. A bunch of FC and scsi disk arrays are not pictured either. Some misc hotmix cd's, softimage XSI and irix 5.3 install media not pictured either. other than that, this is everything i just picked up.

now that's a proper truckload you got there

wow, some nice stuff there.
That Indi 5000 is a very rare KVM switch specifically for SGI workstations.

Nice..

Nice!

The monitor and the Crystal Eyes go with the Crimson (but should work with other systems).
The Blue Sonic box usually goes with an Octane -- it's not ADAT but you need a special sound card with "SCSI" (like) connectors in a PCI card cage.
Flame 2009 is probable Linux only -- for IRIX v2008 was the last one. Same for Maya: v6.5 was the last for IRIX.

I bought many different copys of maya for IRIX, windows and linux. I have a heap of dell servers over here, thought i could see if it was possible to have them render things as a backend or something.

oh, forgot to mention, also got 2 octane card cages, a FC card for the octane, as well as an 8gb kit for the octane.

Can you give better info on what kind of card i need to interface with the Blue Sonic box? what kind of card do i need to connect to it, any hopes of finding one, or is it obscure and hard to find?

I do not really need the indy 5000 KVM, i have a heap of octanes, but i like my current monitor config. If it is of use to someone else I am open to offers on it.

MrBill wrote: Can you give better info on what kind of card i need to interface with the Blue Sonic box?

I think it's called a Sonic Solutions USP Interface, and it's really seems to be some sort of SCSI board. Have a look at this: http://www.symetrixaudio.com/kb/ADA8824_Sonic_ug.pdf

The blue Sonic box is a version of the Lucid ADA8824, which also works with SGI IRIX and Discreet software, but can be connected straight to an ADAT port on the Octane/Onyx2/Tezro (if it has the audio board). ADA8824's still fetch a couple of hundred on eBay, the Sonic versions much less because of the required I/O card.

NB: I've been looking for that Crimson I/O board, but it wasn't in the storage location where I was hoping it would be, so now it's got to be in the other, except I've got my parents in law visiting next week...

No rush on the Crimson board, find it when you can and get back to me, thanks. I Am trying to get everything cataloged and organized so the crimson can wait for a while.