The collected works of chicaneuk - Page 1

I'm not likely to buy any Apple pro hardware, but I do watch the kit that they've been releasing over the years and like many others it's hard not to be concerned.. they seem to have seen just how much money they can make selling iPads and iPhones and seems like they're content to wash their hands of the pro market.

When was the last time the Mac Pro even got a worthy refresh? When was the last time they even released a truly new and interesting product? Worrying times.

I'm curious to know in what regard their Xserve and Xsan stuff was held by the pro market - was it pretty popular / liked (despite clearly not selling well) or was it actually pretty universally despised? I know we had some Xserve and Xsan stuff in our place but it didn't stay in production for long - no idea why, as it was before my time and the kit was on the way out of the door as I started!

I apologise to the OP as this has gone way off topic But it's an interesting discussion!

I've always wanted a sort of Mac Pro 'junior'. I've never been able to justify a full on Mac Pro, and to be honest don't need that much horse power. Would like something half the size of the Mac Pro, with the same level of upgrade options (memory / gpu / hdd), but just single CPU and without the room for PCI-e HBA's and so forth. The Mac Mini is too weak for me as an occasional gamer, the iMac is enormously expensive because of the (admittedly very nice) display and the Mac Pro is out of date and expensive. I want something I guess between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro but something tells me it'll NEVER happen and a Hackintosh is the only way to achieve it!

Hi..

I've already made a few random posts in other areas of the site but figured I should make a post.

I'm not actually an SGI user in any formal sense.. by day I'm a Windows and VMware guy, but for the last 12 years or so I've just had a strange attachment to old SGI's. I can't explain it. I don't really know a huge amount about IRIX (can just about get my way round) but always liked how the hardware looked, and loved the novelty of being able to buy this hardware that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars back in the 90's, for next to nothing.

I previously owned a fairly modest spec Indy (which I bought back in I think 2000 from Ian Mapleson) which was subsequently sold on to a friend after I moved and had no room for collecting stuff, but after another change in circumstances recently I acquired an Indigo2 from a friend of mine. I since sourced some new old stock Ultra320 SCSI disks from work and once again got in touch with Ian to pick up a converter / adaptor to connect it up to the Indigo2 drive sled so I could do a fresh install of Irix onto a new disk rather than using the knackered old one that was already in it. The I2 is currently refusing to work properly because of memory errors but that's something to sort for another time.

On and off I'm looking to acquire an Octane at some point (always really wanted one!), and to compliment my SGI box I've recently picked up a Apple PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5GHz (liquid cooled!) and a pretty tidy Apple PowerMac G4 Cube. I don't know exactly why I'm collecting this stuff or what I'll do with it - I suppose eventually I'll just donate it on to a computer museum or something, but it just feels such a shame to throw such interesting old hardware away!

Cheers.

Afraid not - I don't do anything that interesting, professionally

Thanks for the welcome guys! It's great that a resource like this exists on the net.

But the graphics chip in the Mac Mini is rubbish if you like to do any half decent gaming. Admittedly it'd be nice to finally just give up and move away from gaming but I do like to dabble occasionally.. and I dislike playing FPS's on consoles....

Well I managed to tick off one "must visit" earlier this year when I spent a week in and around San Francisco - it was excellent

Other 'must visits' are Japan, something really hot and expensive like some Bali beach resort with deep blue sea and palm trees.. and lastly I *really* want to see the Northern Lights.

Once I've bought a house next year, I'll start planning (and saving!) for these trips!

I recently obtained a Quad 2.5GHz PowerMac with the liquid cooling system. As you say it's a potential minefield in terms of if it breaks but thankfully there are loads of really good articles that people have written about maintaining it, repairing it, identifying if it's about to go pop... so I wouldn't let it put you off

Machine seems pretty brisk too and is a bit quieter than the regular air cooled Dual 2GHz G5 I replaced it with.

Help!

I'm a bit of an SGI newbie. I currently own an Indigo 2 and it hasn't wanted to boot for some time.. I finally got around to sourcing the correct serial cable from Amazon and a USB to serial adaptor and got it all hooked up tonight. The system powers on, gives me a little menu and when I ask it to boot the system after about 5 seconds of disk access it dumps the following:



The system is fully populated with RAM and my gut is telling me this is a memory error... am I right? If so is it time to start swapping out SIMM's one at a time until I find the culprit(s)?

Thanks in advance!

Thanks for the feedback guys - much appreciated. I'm thinking a can of compressed air to blow dust out of the nooks and crannies, and perhaps alcohol wipes to clean connectors and so forth - or is that dangerous and likely to induce a static charge? Not really owned equipment old enough to need this sort of cleaning before so unsure how to proceed! (and don't want to make the situation worse!)

Are either of the Octanes available still? I live down in Coventry and would love to take one off your hands.

Hm - can't remember what CPU it has in it. I don't think it's particularly high-end though.

Question on the G5 Quad... do you use OSX on it ( and if so, presumably 10.5.8 ) or are there any distributions of Linux that work fully on them? I have a G5 Quad too (there were a bunch about to get put in the dumpster at work, so I rescued one) but am finding that support for applications in 10.5.8 is starting to get pretty limiting, and at least Linux would be 'current' on it!

Hi,

I just picked up an O2 from the dumpster at work. It's not a massive spec but there were a few others in a bad state so managed to salvage some memory to boost it up to an R5000 300MHz with 256MB RAM. It came with no hard drives, but does have both caddies. I had a brand new, sealed, new old stock 72GB IBM Ultra 320 SCSI disk kicking around from an old system so fitted that into the caddy - and now the machine no longer powers up! Previously I could get to the 'BIOS' screen and go into the Maintenence screen and so forth. Now with the drive in, the power LED just remains orange, no boot up chime, and no display. Presumably the drive is not compatible but reading the FAQ it does say Ultra 320 disks should be ok. Is it the size of the disk that's the problem or should that be OK?

Is there something I'm missing?

Thanks in advance.

Excellent - thanks for the quick response! It was one of three machines - the other two were R5K 200MHz's with the earlier type skins and this has the later type skins so I decided to take this one. And it's only metaphorically a dumpster - really it's a computer disposal storage unit, so no jam sandwiches or other things likely to be clogging up the slots

I'll have another tinker with it at lunch time and see if I can get it to come to life with the drive in, and I'll report back.

Thanks for that information. Annoyingly I do have the correct serial cable for an Indy / Indigo2 but not a regular serial cable for an O2.

Worth mentioning that it works just fine with the drive removed - it's only when I insert the drive that I get this behaviour. Without it installed, the system comes on fine (but obviously doesn't boot!).

OK - total non problem. The O2 is indeed powering on, but it just takes a fair bit longer to do so with a drive installed in it. The drive was so quiet I wasn't hearing it spin up! But once it does, I get the jingle and the O2 welcome screen comes up - if I enter command monitor and run hinv, I can see it listed in the hardware.

Cheers for the advice & help folks

Output from my Intel Core i5 based Hackintosh running OSX 10.8.4:

I did have a damn good look all over the thing but couldn't see any jumpers. It's possible the O2 drive caddy has obscured one but it's hard to say. I don't plan to reboot it an awful lot once it's built so.. shouldn't really be much of a deal

Yep



Forgot to say that the '4' on the second line did also appear on my previous output - I just didn't include it for some reason!

Oops.. good spot. I've used that as the hostname for my primary system for years, mostly because of my love for SGI boxes and the names they used.. I never thought about how that might go down amongst actual SGI enthusiasts though. I always name my secondary system (e.g. a laptop) 'FUEL' - and yet I own neither an Octane nor a Fuel. Go figure. Maybe when I finally get my O2 installed, I'll call it 'Dell' or something just to keep the convention going

Just to bump this to a conclusion, can confirm it's one bank of memory that's duff. Spent a bit of time last night pulling the system apart, reseating stuff and was still running into problems. Then started to rotate taking one bank of memory out and lo and behold with one set of 4x32MB SIMM's removed the system boots and runs perfectly time after time. With these modules installed the system hangs on booting, sometimes won't even power on properly... obviously there's a very unhappy module in there.

At some point I'll rotate all four through one of the banks of good modules and see if I can isolate the faulty one.

Thanks for the tips! Was great to get it running again.

I'm at my wits end trying to get a hard-drive that works in this machine. The problem is I have an abundance of old HP SCSI drives from old servers, here at work - the problem is they all seem to be modified versions of compatible drives (going by the information on Ian Mapleson's site) that have the jumpers (for forcing SE mode, parity, etc) all deleted from the PCB - I can get the O2 to boot into fx just fine, and repartition the disk but then as soon as I attempt to install IRIX I get a whole screen full of parity errors along with some ugly messages, before being spat out to the 'Safe to power off' screen.

Think I'm reluctantly going to have to fork out for a drive off Ian or someone. Not exactly turning out to be a free machine!

No longer needed. Thanks.

Good info, thanks. Sorry for these lame questions! I'm totally clueless when it comes to this SGI kit, and SCSI in general!

The disks would almost all have been in arrays of some kind even if 4-6 disk raidsets on a server.

Of course it's also possible that there's a fault with the O2 - I could be jumping through hoops for a problem that's actually more terminal. But I'll try the steps you've suggested and see how I get on! I thought it odd as I am running one of these types of drives in my Indigo2 at home with no problems though that's going through one of Ian Mapleson's adaptors..

OK - so I found a new old stock / sealed Ultra 320 36GB 10k SCSI disk at work this morning and threw that into the O2. Came up nice and quickly and I booted into fx, to create a partition on the disk and then launched the installer - same parity error! I'm running it now through the low level format process (being going for about 3 hours!) and will report back on whether it works after that.

Doh.. I think I worded my reply wrong - I'm doing the exercise on the disk that you advised me to do Not a low level format!

Successfully completed the write exercise test with no warnings or errors. Rebooted into the installer, and getting the same error:



Starting to wonder if there's something bad on this O2

Doing some more reading up I'm seeing some comments about checking the internal CDROM drive (which in my case is dead - and disconnected, pending a replacement coming from Ian Mapleson). I wonder if that's causing me this trouble as it's not terminating the bus properly?!

OK.. so I guess whilst I'm waiting for the replacement O2 SCSI CD drive to come, I'll dismantle this external SCSI CD drive and get it hooked up to the internal connector and try again.

Thanks for your patience. I'm totally useless with SCSI stuff, UNIX stuff, etc! It's all a good learning curve though!

Stuck optical drive in from my caddy - no difference, regardless of whether I set the termination jumper on or off. I think I'm stuck waiting for this replacement drive from Ian now until I can truly be confident that everything else is connected as it should be.

Does the external 68 pin SCSI connector need terminating too if not in use?

Thanks for confirming.

Thanks for looking - but think my problem isnt down to drives but something else so going to withdraw my 'want to buy' advert for now! Cheers.

Evidently there's something more wrong with this system. I found an O2 optical drive in the disposals at work - the tray mechanism is broken (surprise) but the drive does at least show up in HINV so I figured it would at least terminate the bus and I could still install from my external CD drive.

No dice - am getting the exact same problems again. A load more O2's have been scrapped now (well, 5 total) so I'm going to try and find some time to assemble one that WORKS somehow as there has to be something weird going on with this one. I would of course welcome any ideas at this point.

Well - on the plus side at least, some of the O2's in disposal look like they could be R10K's

I'm going to have a bit of a scrapping / assembling session ASAP and see if I can get a working machine together.

OK - well after a good session of dismantling systems, building up new ones (including finding some skins in better condition), I seem to have gotten somewhere and got a good upgrade into the bargain.

It seems as though the mainboard / tray / CPU assembly in the one I was working on has an issue. I moved that board into a different chassis, and had the exact same problem. So I put that aside and found an R12K 300MHz board and put that into the original chassis and, lo and behold, I was able to boot into the IRIX installer with no problems! Also don't need the internal optical drive connected it seems and am able to boot the installer from the external optical drive no problems.

So - all I can say is THANK GOD. Frustrating too as no matter what drives I was going through, the board was bad all along. And on the plus side I got an upgrade to an R12K

Thanks for all the help and advice - it was much appreciated.

And it's alive with 6.5.22 I'll have to stick a hinv up in the right section later today, when I've got the network up

The culmination of trying to get a load of dumpstered O2's into one working machine. I may have some more memory to go in at some point, but this is enough to get me up and running!



Cheers!

My workmates aren't into old UNIX stuff at all and I think I'm crazy building this thing up and the amount of HOURS I've put into getting it going again. However I'll do my best to grab a shot soon. Cosmetically it's not too bad but the outer skin on the right hand side has a huge great scratch across it - unfortunately it was the best condition skin out of 5 O2's!

I just love how cool it looks on my desk though. Such awesome product designers SGI had!

Cool - I found some cheap sampler kits on eBay - I will get one ordered and see how it goes

I have an O2 CD drive cover you can have for free, if you want to cover the shipping from the UK!