SGI: Hardware

Flashed, upgraded, hinv posted. The Fuel is rockin', do come knockin'.

Shortly to be the proud owner of *another* Fuel. Made a quick hit on an eBay auction and picked up another Fuel, mostly because I wanted the bezel and for spare parts, but this one also seems to have a SCSI card (I think) and a tape drive. When it gets here I'll decide if I want to move the bezel and tape to my current machine or spec it out and see if I want to Frankenstein them. It has a scuff on the front panel but I can buff that out -- the main thing is it has a working door!

Spare Fuel arrived. No hard disk (as expected). Incredible collection of dust bunnies on the interior and in the front bezel, and some very interesting and ominous nuclear testing stickers on it (moved to the main case as a curiosity factor).

After a heroic cleaning, buffing and recolour, the bezel is nearly perfect except for some minor shallow scrapes. And the door works. So I stuck it on the KVM and decided to see what other goodies it had.

- Despite having the same PROM version as my regular Fuel (bigred), i.e., 6.210, it reacts very differently and badly to the Aten USB-DVI KVM that bigred uses mostly happily. The mouse moves briefly and seizes, never to move again, though the keyboard works at least to the extent that I can press ENTER. I had to connect a PS/2 keyboard and mouse to get into the command monitor. It didn't matter which of the two ports it was connected to. There was a difference in firmware also; it gave me a slightly different and terser message when changing KVM focus in the PROM monitor (than bigred does).

- 512MB RAM, yawn. V10 graphics, yawn. 700MHz CPU, woohoo! So now I have a spare PIMM of the same speed. If someone wants a 600MHz spare card reasonably cheaply, PM.

- The SCSI card is an LSI 22320, but its SGI part number is 013-1994-001B, not -002.

- The tape drive is a Sony SDT-10000 DDS-4 drive. It seems to power up normally. I'll have to scare some tapes up out of storage. I should have some DDS-2 ones around here, at least.

On the whole, this should make a nice backup, but the PROM USB difference is puzzling. I'm going to move the SCSI card, tape and bezel to bigred when I get a round tuit.

Along with the V12 that came in the first one you've done pretty well with the you-never-know-what-you're-gonna-get-box-of-chocolates surplus Fuels. Congrats! PROM might be the same, but how about the hardware revisions? Might be interesting to compare an L1 serial all run against either system. If you spot anything different, be sure to let us know - don't recall seeing any info on the subject.

BTW, If you also want to compare an IRIX hinv -vm you could always clone the drive from Big Red - if you haven't already been-there-cloned-that, BetXen's commented clone script is my preferred method. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11322

Delete your ioconfig.conf and reboot before you get too carried away. (It will make a new file with just the hardware you have connected upon reboot.) Ioconfig has bit my ass many times in the past. It never deletes old hardware entries, so gets easily confused when you change input devices.


My Mom had a solution for that. She'd poke a little hole in the bottom of each one to see what was inside. Then she ate the good ones ... sheesh.