RS/6000 7043-140 boot floppies

Alan Perry via cctech wrote: Last year I started working on a 7012-320H that I've had for some time; it would not boot AIX, but it would stall during boot up before bringing up the console. People in this list and elsewhere made many useful suggestions. I made? the proper serial cabling, no console.? Finally, I was able to boot in system maintenance mode from boot AIX 3.2.5 diskettes that? I found on the net, and got a console.? I then discovered that the hard drive had 3.1.005 in it; still, managed to replace the /etc/security/passwd file (using just cat? and cp, there's no ls or ed in the maintenance shell) with a version that had the root password removed.? The system booted now, except that it would not mount /usr, because there wasn't an /etc/mount binary. After examining an image of the hard drive, I noticed that the binary for /etc/unmount had error messages for mounting operations, had this hunch that /etc/mount was the same binary as /etc/unmount, copied the latter to the former, and voila, I had a booting system.? You should be able to do the same if you can boot from a CD. Since then I added a second hard drive (the original was just 400mb), and I have been trying to build a toolchain and numeric processing programs.? I was able to build gcc-2.7.2 after building an early gmake with the system's cc even though the assembler in 3.1.005 has a known bug, then I built binutils-2.9.1 (the last version that will build ld on AIX 3.1.005), and then I succesfully built gcc-2.95.3 configured to use binutils and not the system's ld and as.? The last version of gcc supported on 3.1.005 is 3.3.6, but the build process fails early on at the dreaded gengtype stage with the usual "running out of memory" error (this is something that also happens under SunOS 4.1.4; my IPXs are at 2.95.3 too). So, I'm stuck at 2.95.3, but I've managed to build at least some things with it; right now I have: autoconf-2.59, bash-2.05b, binutils-2.9.1, bison-1.50, bpmpd-2.30, bvi-1.3.2, bzip2-1.0.2, fftw-3.3.7, flex-2.5.4, glpk-4.45, glpk-4.65, gawk-3.0.4, gmp-4.2.4, gnuplot-4.4.4, gperf-2.7.2, groff-1.10, gsl-2.1, gzip-1.3.12, jpeg-8d, lapack-3.1.1, libgd-2.0.33, libpng-1.4.22, m4-1.4.1, make-3.81, mpfr-3.1.6, ncurses-5.2, patch-2.5.9, pcre-6.7, perl-5.6.2, qhull-2009, qrupdate-1.1.2, readline-4.2, rx-1.5, screen-4.0.3, sed-3.0.2, texinfo-4.0, tiff-3.9.7, vim-5.8, zlib-1.2.3. I had to modify the source in most of them.? I have built a python-2.2.3 executable but right now it fails when importing modules, and I have been trying to build several versions of octave without success.? Most issues have to do with ancient system libs, ancient c++ grammar in gcc-2.95.3, a nonstandard dynamic loading mechanism, lack of UNIX98 features, and general senescence in this system.? But I like it anyway.? I wish I had a network card.? Sometime in the future I will configure a SLIP server with an old linux box or a raspberry and try to network the thing. carlos.