The collected works of techknight

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?

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

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.

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

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.

is the battery why the monitor is blacking out randomly?

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

I picked up an SGI Indy years ago from a buddy of mine, I tried playing with it in the past and got nowhere, so I decided to try again.

I cannot get the thing to go to the desktop at all without the monitor blanking out, or complaning its out of range.

The machine will start up to the diag screen, and then the IRIX 6.5 boot console starts doing its thing, gets all the way to Starting Session Directory Server or something along those lines, then black... monitor switches off, and then goes to "Out of Range" I tried a different monitor in the past and got the same results, that monitor is long gone.

I tried setenv monitor h and monitor i, etc.. and I am getting nowhere fast.

I have 0 experience with SGI, all I wanted to do was play around. now I am stuck!

any ideas?

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...

Using the other method with the Fill command, I got the MAC address fixed, And now all the network services appear to be starting up.

However the monitor still goes out of range. But, one thing I found out is if I press the power button on the front, the monitor comes back to the console saying system is shutting down, stopping X, etc... So that tells me the issue is with X Server set with a wacked out resolution.

I am using a Viewsonic E70 monitor, Well, attempting to.

Now, how to fix?

As far as waiting the 15 minutes thing, it makes sense because the NVRAM battery hack I havent performed yet, so its resetting/clearing the monitor settings so it comes back. I read somewhere that Irix 6.5 sets the system resolution on startup and keeps it there. So when it blacks out, it stays that way until the NVRAM gets reset back to default. It all makes sense now.

Whoops, already had a thread on this. Just necromacyfied it.

so how do I fix or reset that?

Well something isnt right in the VGA circuit somewhere....

I "obtained" an irix 6.5 disk. I decided to put it in, and hit install software. it started a copying progress bar, and soon as it finished, screen when "out of range" while the HDD was still loading stuff.

So again, I forced rebooted, went back to the command window thingy, and typed boot. then it complained about an incomplete miniroot whatever that is. I decided to let it fix itself by pressing F, and screen blacked out again while reading from CD and HDD doing its thing.

Rebooted it, and this time after typing boot, i got a sash prompt, I could do an LS and see what was on the HDD but thats about as far as I could get...

I think SGI is a little bit too advanced for what I am willing to get into, and it doesnt appear its going to be an easy fix.

So I think I am going to pull the HDD since its a nice 2GB SCSI, go stick it in one of my Macs, and toss the machine. I figured I would give it another go, but once again, ended in failure.

Currently though, its running some sort of diagnostics thing with the front LED flashing, and a spinning doodad on the screen console. taking forever.