Indigo Fresh Install Problems

[Baphijmm]

Hello all; it's been a little while. I've finally managed to get my hands on an Indigo drive sled, which means I can finally attempt to install IRIX 5.3 on my old Indigo R3K. Attempting to do so however has been quite a chore, and at this point I'm kinda stumped.

I've got an external CD-ROM drive set up on ID 6, with parity and block size jumpers in place. (This was the first hurdle; took me a few hours of playing around with jumpers before the silly thing would even read the disk properly.) As this is a "fresh" HDD, naturally it has not been configured with fx; the CD I have for IRIX 5.3 does have the right sash and will boot into it (albeit with much complaining about the HDD not having valid headers), but attempting to load fx.IP12 results in a very angry series of lines:

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sc0,6,0: cmd=0x28 Unexpected info phase 46, state 49. Resetting SCSI bus
dks0d6s7: retrying request
dks0d6s7: Drive not ready: Driver not ready, ASQ=0x1,.
efs read error, bad count
dksc(0,6,7)stand/fx.IP12: Command not found.

Now, the "Unexpected info" bit is exactly what it was spitting at me while I was trying to figure out the block size jumper situation; I believe I understand that it means the CD-ROM drive was expecting larger block sizes, and had to be forced to shrink its understanding of the block size to accommodate both IRIX 5.3 and the Indigo itself. But then, if the jumper has been set and the thing will even boot successfully into sash, why suddenly can it not accomplish fx?

[dexter1]

The R3000 Indigo can be finicky with respect to a CDROM supporting 512 byte block size. What is the CDROM model number and manufacturer?

[Baphijmm]

It's a Yamaha CRW8424S, in a ClubMac external SCSI enclosure with Centronics 50 plugs.

[dexter1]

The only result i can find for that model in combination with an SGI is on the German forum: Someone hooked it up to an Indy. They had some vague problem of the CDROM not recognizing CD's, but that could be due to something else unrelated to your problem.

You could try setting the ID to 4, since that is SGI default SCSI-id for the CDROM.
You can also look if there is a firmware upgrade for that model, since it's a burner. Maybe that can cure the block size problem.

[jan-jaap]

• Systems with ARCS firmware (Indigo R4000, Indigo2, Indy and newer) can set the block size of the CD-ROM. Any SCSI CD-ROM should work.
• Older systems like the Indigo R3000 and the Crimson can not, so the CD-ROM must be set to 512 byte block size mode by hand, usually using a jumper.
• Really old systems, like Professional IRISes or PowerSeries with v3.x ROMs don't support CD-ROMs at all, and require a CD-ROM drive with modified firmware which masquerades as a fixed disk when first booted.

With the 512byte jumper set, this drive should work with an Indigo R3000. As with all 20+ year old mechanical devices, YMMV.

[Baphijmm]

The 512 block size jumper is in place; that's the only way I could get it to recognize the disk in the first place. It boots sash with no issues, but anything on the seventh "section" seems... nonexistent. It's there, but there's no readable file system directory. An ls of that portion returns that it exists, but with no file system.

[robespierre]

You may already know this, but the PROM Monitor can't list EFS or XFS volumes. Sash is needed to do that.
So you could type

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>> boot
sash: ls dksc(0,6,7)

to list the EFS volume on an Irix CD, but ls from the >> prompt won't understand it.

[Baphijmm]

You may already know this, but the PROM Monitor can't list EFS or XFS volumes. Sash is needed to do that.
So you could type

Code: Select all

>> boot
sash: ls dksc(0,6,7)

to list the EFS volume on an Irix CD, but ls from the >> prompt won't understand it.

I actually did not know this; however, the ls returned nothing in either the PROM prompt or sash. Sash also reported something about a efs read error?

[Baphijmm]

Decided to try moving the CD-ROM to ID4 this evening; unfortunately, this made no difference. I decided to take a photo, shown below; if you click, it will take you to the full-size image. (Careful, it's big.)



Having done a bit of searching on this problem elsewhere, the most consistent means of fixing it seems to be to update the CD drive's firmware; however, as I do not have a PC with a SCSI input on it, I'm not sure I'll be able to do this. Seems like my best bet will probably be to find a workable CD drive. I'd found a few links to usable units for this purpose on the forums here, but they're all dead; does anyone have a good list? Or even just a recommendation?

[jan-jaap]

I normally start fx from sash, not directly, like this (assuming a device at ID #4):

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boot -f dksc(0,4,8)sashIP12 dksc(0,4,7)stand/fx.IP12 --x

[Baphijmm]

I normally start fx from sash, not directly, like this (assuming a device at ID #4):

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boot -f dksc(0,4,8)sashIP12 dksc(0,4,7)stand/fx.IP12 --x

It was certainly worth a shot, and the error mode did change slightly: It spat out the same error message, but then quickly dumped back to the System Maintenance Menu. Pretty sure it's still having the same problem, but because it was initiated during a boot like that, it dropped the whole thing.

[Baphijmm]

Alright, starting to get frustrated now.

I'd found a site (http://www.megarat.com/indigo/) that stated the Indigo R3k could boot properly with a Toshiba XM3501B CD-ROM drive. Found one on eBay, and it arrived this afternoon.

This drive has no way to set its expected block size, or at least I'm definitely not seeing the jumper for it. The Indigo certainly seems to think it's looking at the wrong block size, as it's producing the same "Unexpected info phase 46, state 49. Resetting SCSI bus" error just trying to start into sash.

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas? I'm completely stumped here.

EDIT: After some more futzing with it, which ultimately resulted in me returning to the original jumper layout I'd had before, it is now displaying an entirely new error, something about the 0 block of the disk being unreadable. Might be useful?

[Daniel80486]

I just got IRIX 6.5 to install on my R4k Indigo. I appear to have some hardware problems, but I'm gonna clean and re-seat everything in my Indigo before making a "please help me" post. I have some random lockups, but got a successful install after a few tries.

I'm using the same CD-ROM drive as you, a Toshiba XM-3501B.

How, exactly, do you have it connected? Not sure if it matters, but to be thorough, my XM-3501B is in an external enclosure with two 50-pin Centronics connectors on the back; one goes to the Indigo with a 6-foot SCSI cable and the other has a DataMate DM800-09-R Active Terminator on it.

Anything you want me to check, or try?

[pentium]

A six foot scsi cable??

Try something a little bit shorter. I've run into problems when the daisy chain was excessively long. Mainly read and bus errors.

[robespierre]

6 feet is about the limit for single-ended 10 MHz SCSI. The CDROM drive will probably negotiate at 5 MHz, though, so it should be okay. I agree that shorter lengths are more reliable (the long cables like 6 or 10 feet are mainly designed for differential systems, which can be much longer because of their common mode noise rejection).

The jumpers to set the block size on the XM-xxxx drives are pads on the circuit board that you can cut with an X-Acto knife. You normally cut the outermost pad (see http://rainbow.ldeo.columbia.edu/docume ... re/40.html).