SGI: Hardware

Well I literally know nothing about SGI, except the few movies ive seen it in, and of course, the N64 which I was an avid fan of growing up in the 90s.

Anyway, I finally got an SGI 13W3 adapter on ebay to hook a PC monitor to. Its an old NEC Accusync 75F CRT.

Seomtimes, i get the chime and the screen will come up and show Booting System. Then the screen goes black. Cant do anything from this point.

One time it actually stayed on and shown the text window. starting the system, shown something about a mac address, then got to IP something, and hung there. And it went black. I paid absolutely no attention to the text on screen during this moment.

But then sometimes I get a chime, and the light stays red for awhile before turning green, and the monitor NEVER comes up.

Any ideas?

Serial boot should help see what's going on.

it doesnt have a regular serial port that I can plug something into?

Well, it does. You just don't have the right connector. You need a mini-DIN 8 to RS-232 cable (or you can build one, pinouts are here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=316&p=2094&#p2094 ).

Well after more tinkering, I have figured out that I have to leave the machine physically cut-off from AC mains power for at least 15 minutes in order for the monitor to stay on.

Otherwise, itll come up Starting up the system... and go black.

But when it does come up, Here is where it hangs for a couple minutes:



After it hangs up here, itll eventually go black.

Actually nope, It got a bit further before it went black.

Here is the final screen right before it goes black.

I'm wondering if you have a shot logic board. The ec0 failure is not typical for a bad Dallas battery (the usual failure mode is ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff and it won't even get into the operating system IIRC). It shouldn't make it black out like that.

Yea , I dunno. Maybe caps? If it is the logic board ill probably end up scrapping the machine. I really dont have any other SGI hardware, or know anything about that line of computing to take interest in it.

Anyway, here is a link to my video on what its doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryg5QoZveh8

Hey that Indy looks way too mint to scrap, from the video it looks like there's not a scratch on it! If you don't want to doctor it up I'm sure one of us would be more than willing to take it off your hands in the Hardware For Sale forum...

Anyway yeah it's the Dallas chip battery, I've had to replace the one in my Octane twice since 2007, and when the battery goes dead it renders the machine absolutely unusable. And as others have mentioned you'd get a ton more useful information from the bootup if you motivate yourself out to the local Micro Center and procure a NULL modem cable...

Anyone have a proceedure to open/fix the indy battery? I know there is a process on the web for the older dallas PS/2 IBM chips, but they are smaller, less pins, and different.

The procedure is similar to (but maybe slightly different from wrt. pin locations etc, as it is a different chip in the indy vs. the onyx...) viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16723444&

http://www.vdheijden-messerli.net/sgist ... io4-nvram/

If you want to get a feel for what you might be in for if you go down that route...

There's also a wiki page based on that thread - I just added some external links to it, as well as the relevant forum threads.

The Indigo and Indy pages mention battery replacement in varying detail. I guess I'll add that to the "round to it" list - maybe a central page that indexes all our model-specific threads and pages, as well as external classics like the Sun NVRAM FAQ at squirrel.com.

is the battery why the monitor is blacking out randomly?

I can understand Mac addy error being battery. But blacking out?

Try this and see what happens:

When the "Welcome to Indy Silicon Graphics Computer Systems" splash screen comes up press escape to stop for maintenance.

From the screen type "5" to get to the PROM monitor.

From here you can run "hinv" to see what all you have installed (as long as the firmware recognizes it). You can leave it on this screen for a few minutes and see if it goes black. If it goes black here then things are bad.

If it's still up try typing "single". This will boot IRIX single-user mode and won't (ideally) load any (or as many) things that may be dependent on the network. It also won't start X, instead it drops you to a root shell on the textport (the SGI version of a glass console).

Post whether or not this works. You may have to wait for many minutes if it's trying to mount something NFS.

Question: do you have access to an IRIX CD to get a miniroot?

Third thing: From the PROM monitor you can also type "ide" to start up the SGI Integrated Diagnostic Environment. It will run some self tests and can sometimes be instructive.

I'm putting money on a power supply getting cranky. The key thing you mentioned was you had to remove it from mains power to get it to behave and it's been known for a while that they can be troublesome. We just have not had too many people messing with their Indy's as of late so we assumed most of the bad PSU's were weeded out.

Still, it might not hurt to try a recap.

I can understand Mac addy error being battery. But blacking out?

That's exactly my point. I don't think this is the Dallas battery; it shouldn't even get into IRIX. I like pentium's suggestion about the power supply too; I've had at least one Indy PS go bad on me.

I can't even imagine how much hardware has been butchered by the "recapping" hysteria.
The Indy power supplies commonly fail, see the info here: http://www.nekochan.net/reputable/indytech.html

Yep, there's a good chance it's hardware, but let's go around any potentially twisted software issues with "single" or a miniroot first.

robespierre wrote: I can't even imagine how much hardware has been butchered by the "recapping" hysteria.
The Indy power supplies commonly fail, see the info here: http://www.nekochan.net/reputable/indytech.html

Not to bring up an old thread, but to say, had some similar issues to the poster with an Indy recently. Occasionally it wouldn't come on at all, leaving it unplugged for a few minutes usually did the trick. Did some work last night (did a fresh install), rebooted after the 6.5.22 upgrade and would not power on even after 30 minutes of leaving it unplugged.

The bigger question that I have is, anyone thinking 5-10 years down the road when these 20+ year old machines start having these problems regularly?

Oh, I totally forgot about this thread and started a new one. Necromacy!!!

Anyways, hinv, works. and Single boot keeps asking for a root password which I dont know unfortunately. Thats as far as I am getting at this point.

I am trying to use the setenv -f eaddr to fix the MAC, but its refusing saying it cannot be changed. Grrr...