Nekochan Net

I finally got around to experimenting with the rs6000 I've had lying around for a while last night as a replacement hdd arrived. A few seconds into fitting it quickly revealed that standard scsi disks are just slightly too small to screw directly onto the metal cage itself but a bit of googling around this morning hasn't revealed anything about these machines needing disk brackets.

I know a few of you nekochanners have these machines yourself - can anyone tell me for sure whether a 7044-140 should have the internal disks bracket mounted? I could easily just hack the thing in but I plan to fill all 3 internal slots and would rather do it properly if at all possible. Bloody IBM :[

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hardware/software agnostic sadmin

Answering myself: in short, no.

According to the service manual available at http://publib16.boulder.ibm.com/pseries/en_US/infocenter/base/hardware_docs/pdf/380561.pdf the internal disk cage should have come with a load of stupid little blue grommits and special mounting screws. Predictably, my cage of course came with none of these.

So it looks like option 2 as usual: hack it in somehow. Some skateboard rubber washers and a good search through the loose screws collection should do it.

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hardware/software agnostic sadmin

As you said "little blue grommits and special mounting screws" but you can avoid these items.

I have installed a regular internal 9.1 GB SCSI disk using the screws from the original PC and the disk fits ok. I use this second disk for dual boot AIX/Linux.

Both disks have the same interface (SCSI 68 pins) but AIX recognizes the second disk slightly different from the first one because the electrical signals differs, I have read about this but I can't explain it now, internal memory fault

The second disk is fully functional on AIX/Linux but the boot time has increased a lot, OpenBIOS takes much more time to scan the SCSI bus.

I you're interested I can post the exact messages from OpenBIOS and AIX.

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Indy R4400 150 MHz, 256 MB, Indy 24-bit, IRIX 6.5.22m/Debian GNU/Linux
Octane2 R12K 400 MHz, 1 GB, VPro V6, IRIX 6.5.30
IBM 44p 170 POWER3-II 400 MHz, 1 GB, Matrox G200 (GXT130P), AIX 5.3/Debian GNU/Linux
HP C3750+C3600 2GB, HP-UX 11v1/Debian GNU/Linux

Well I took care of that last night by using some high impact rubbers from my skateboarding box-o-crap and some slightly odd screws from my computer box-o-crap: disk is now installed in bay 4. Unfortunately I didn't get much time to experiment with it but I can already tell this is going to be one of those long jobs... service processor/firmware flashes both failed, verified basic system integrity with an old version of IBM's standalone diagnostics CD for rs6000s, fiddled around to get debian booted and then found for some reason the OBP is outputting at some weird non-standard very high-resolution which renders the D-I screen unusable. At that point I gave up and did some real work, but I'm going home tonight armed with a big long list of error codes to get to the bottom of it all. First job: connect it to one of my proper high end monitors and/or reset the resolution.

I'm going to have to source AIX as our set of old disks has disappeared so I'm stuck with linux initially - did you find any particularly useful resources for rs6000/linux while you were setting yours up? There's tons of stuff out there but I was wondering if you'd discovered anything really good.

Oh yeah, and welcome to the "my rs6000 has no front door club" :]

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hardware/software agnostic sadmin

Finally I can post more information about my disks:

Hardware information from OpenFirmware (not OpenBIOS):

9100 MB Harddisk id,lun=2,0
9100 MB Harddisk id,lun=4,0


on AIX, I have translated from Spanish:

hdisk0 Available 10-60-00-4,0 16 bit SCSI LVD disk drive
hdisk1 Available 10-60-00-2,0 another SCSI disk drive

This is the difference, the original disk is SCSI LVD, the second one is a regular SCSI disk.

Both disks work fine, but the system initial test takes much more time than before.

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Indy R4400 150 MHz, 256 MB, Indy 24-bit, IRIX 6.5.22m/Debian GNU/Linux
Octane2 R12K 400 MHz, 1 GB, VPro V6, IRIX 6.5.30
IBM 44p 170 POWER3-II 400 MHz, 1 GB, Matrox G200 (GXT130P), AIX 5.3/Debian GNU/Linux
HP C3750+C3600 2GB, HP-UX 11v1/Debian GNU/Linux

if all you need are the blue grommets, I've got two or three VERY HEAVY IBM disk trays that have those. I just have them because they're massive slabs of steel, they're IBM, and they have these bright blue grommets, but I guess you fixed your problem

Thanks - but, yes, I managed to fix the disk mounting problem. That was the easy bit actually...

Current problem is both firmwares are way out of date and I'm not able to upgrade them so far: I don't have AIX cds [yet] so have to take the floppy update approach from the SMS console which is currently failing with a "250 10000" error which translates to "No diskette in drive. Insert diskette containing firmware." This is very odd because I've verified all the hardware with the standalone diagnostic cd, the floppies I'm using are fine, the firmware flashes are the latest and I can even sit and watch the rs6000 accessing the floppies and reading them ok for a while before it spits out the same error. Grrr...

Even linux is currently out of the question - the old firmware precludes just sticking in the latest debian net install iso and although I've sucessfully booted an older custom sarge cd with a power3 specific kernel I run up against the common problem of the scrambled framebuffer output [tiny fonts, screen mirrored on left and right]. I know I could just hook up a serial console instead but predictably, all my serial cables have gone walkies.

All my new machines seem destined to be very large paperweights for at least a couple of months before I finally get the time to sit down with them properly, RTFM and get them operational :]

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hardware/software agnostic sadmin

Don't forget the serial port option.

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4xRS6K 2xHP9K 6xSUN 1xDEC 14xMAC 7xPC 2xPS2