The collected works of jchamberlain

Hello,

I am just getting into SGI's. I've wanted one forever, but finally started looking for one and bought one on ebay. I now have Octane cmnb015anf250. It's supposed to be a dual 270Mhz, 256MB ram, MXI video card, and a 36GB drive. The pictures from the ad showed it running, but upon arrival it will not boot. I hear the relay click when I plug it in. When I turn it on it goes green and then solid red with another click. I check the leds in the front and they look like the following

X
X0
00
0X

which seems right to me for what cards are installed. I have re-seated the XO cards, system board, memory chips, and cpu with no change. I figured it could be my monitor, so I disconnected everything and hooked a null modem cable to serial port 1 and I don't see anything. I'm using minicom which I have not used before, but I have it set to 9600 8N1 no flow control. Do I need to do anything in minicom to connect?

I'm not sure where to look next. Does anyone have any ideas that I could try?


I'm looking forward to getting the Octane up and running. I hope you guys can help me out.

Thanks in advance,

James

Update: I pulled the MXI card and now I see the POD on the serial connection. The led is still red and it doesn't seem to acept any commands over the serial cable yet.

ok, I found (and fixed) the problem. One of the cards that is part of the MXI card was loose and partially disconnected from being shipped. Plugged it back together, slid the card back in and it booted right away. Awesome. Now onto fixing the video so that it works better with my widescreen lcd.

Thanks

Does the light on the front work and what color is it? I recently bought an Octane and when it arrived it would not boot or provide and output via the graphics card or the serial port. It had a solid red light. I pulled the graphics card (along with the mouse and keyboard) and then I could access it via the first serial port using a null modem cable. From there I knew it was related to the graphics card and upon close inspection the one of the TRAM chips was loose from shipping. Plugged it fully in and everything worked as it should. Before isolating the problem to the card, I reseated everything I could, the CPU, RAM, system board, drive, XO cards. You might need to try the same.

The adapter for the graphics card requires a monitor that suports sync on greeen SOG. You might need to check that you monitor supports that.

I'm new to SGI as well. I just got my Octane a week ago. Do you hear the drive spin up? One thing you could check is the LEDs on the front. If you pull the front cover there are LEDs in the lower right side, there meaning is described in other posts, but there are a few that should be lit. Assuming that is all correct then I would probably use a serial console to check the power on diagnostics.

You find the lights described here: http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/Octane#Front_plane_LEDs . I'm a bit concerned that the heart light is not on. Sounds like something with the system board or the backplane to me. My screws were all bent like yours, not bad enough that I had to drill them out though. I would try re-seating the memory and cpu on the system board and inspecting the connections from the system board to the backplane. I would also visually inspect both the system board and the backplane. Hopefully someone more experienced will chime in here, your at the end of my experience in diagnosing.