Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Picked up two base Indy from a friend in NC two days ago, one works one doesn't, finally got around to the not working one. It has 5.3 installed on a drive.

If I let it boot normally, it will go to the screen "The System is Coming Up" then a split second later the screen goes black, the Indy's shutdown tone plays and the system gives me the restart prompt.

I've already reset the env, gone into sash and booted from the /unix kernel but the result is the same with no messages. Is this a sign of filesystem corruption? And if so, how can I run an fsck from sash? Is it a sign the system's drive is bad? The PSU? I'm at a loss.

Progress. I mounted the drive in my working Indy I got as well. Slice 7 was dirty, managed to fsck it. But it's only /usr, I did want to see what the whole disk had. Slice 6 appears to have a corruption problem. I can neither mount nor fsck. It is an efs filesystem and I don't know how to handle dumping this other than dd, which I already did. Is there a way to dump or rebuild the filesystem ala xfsdump?

If mounting or fsck-ing is not possible on that particular disk, your options are very limited:
The only way to get data from it is dd that disk and hope your hexedit skills are good enough that you can repair the dd-image yourself, or extract the necessary license files and other info.

/usr should contain the most important stuff. If you can mount that partition, archive it with tar/cpio. Then find a new drive and reinstall IRIX 5.3 for Indy.

I dd'd it, I'll mess with it later. For now, got other projects to focus on.