SGI Crimson - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

5 Jan 2008

Jason wrote:

...
  So since mine says "Server" yet has a 13W3
gfx board (haven't opened
 it up to ID it yet, and can't get into the OS to do a gfxinfo) it was
 probably a field-upgrade?  I do have the "Elan" badge as well, and the
 owner only had one Crimson, so I'm assuming that's where it came from.

Most likely. 13W3 outputs do indicate either Entry or Express graphics, 
and the badge indicates "Elan" (though Crimsons did have an Extreme 
option).

...
  I got an internal cdrom recogzined last night.  The
only Irix distro I
 have now is 6.5.  Will the Crimson at least load fx from that?  It was
 acting like it couldn't even find the file, though, giving some scsi
 errors if I booted into the hdd's fx and tried 'ls dksc(....)" on the
 CD.  I tried an Apple CD600i and a Toshiba model which was listed in
 the SGI cdrom survey.  Of course, they could be bad drives, who knows.
   Too many variables!

 Next method will be to attach the boot drive to another SGI and edit
 /etc/passwd from there.

 Thanks for all the helps

No go- IRIX support for IP17 stopped at 6.2 (it's substantially 
different from the later ARCS-derived systems, and has more in common 
with the R3000/R2000 based systems than the later ones). IRIX 5.3 or 
IRIX 6.2 are your best bets, though IRIX 4.0.5 (hard to find software 
for), IRIX 5.1 (yuck!), and 5.2 (much better, but still not as good as 
5.3) will also run on it. The SCSI errors don't sound good- check your 
setup there. You might see file not found errors, but they won't be 
SCSI errors.