SGI Indigo2 Hard Drive Problem

[Phill Harvey-Smith]

John Finigan wrote:
> A couple of months ago I was lucky enough to find a SGI Power
> Indigo2, with a R8000 CPU.  Naturally it came with no HDD sled but it
> had a DAT drive on a sled which I figured would work.  Only problem
> is that when I put a HDD on the DAT sled, using an 80 pin to 50 pin
> adapter (known good),  I never see a HDD in the firmware (serial
> console).

As far as I can tell that should work, asuming of course that the sled 
is ok. Does the firmware see the DAT drive if you put that in the sled ?

> Googling didn't produce a lot of answers so I figured I'd ask the
> list. Can the DAT sled be used like this?  The SCSI ID selection
> seems to depend, a little too cleverly, on what bay the sled is
> plugged into, but the sled has a small cable which is supposed to
> plug into ID selection pins on the drive. 

Yep that's normally the way it works with most of the SGI machines, I 
would imagine that it effectivly extends the jumper pins onto the 
backplane, where they are linked by tracks....

>					 I have nowhere to put
> that.  Maybe the cable needs some of its pins bridged?  

Nope, just leave them disconnected.

>							The drive
> itself is jumpered to the ID that the machine expects for a boot
> drive.

Humm the drive is known working I take it ? Do you have something else 
that you can try the drive + 50-80 pin converter in.

> Is a 9 GB drive too big for the firmware?  I am a SGI novice, and my
> reading of the docs says the firmware should "just see" a correctly
> configured drive without entering any commands to rescan, but am I
> wrong about that?

Nope 9G should be fine for a machine of that age, We have one of the 
same machines stored at work, and I think that has a larger drive in.

The really important thing to remember about SGI machines is that the 
contoler's SCSI ID is 0 and not the more conventional 7, this did seem 
to trip up a lot of people :)

If you have an external SCSI box and apropreate cables you could try 
connecting the drive to the external SCSI port, and see if the drive can 
be seen there as this is a different physical interface (at least it is 
on the R4K and R10K indigo 2s).

Can you post a log of a hinv from the serial console, as that might tell 
me if things look ok (and I may be able to compare it to the R8K at work).

Cheers.

Phill.


-- 
Phill Harvey-Smith, Programmer, Hardware hacker, and general eccentric !

"You can twist perceptions, but reality won't budge" -- Rush.