RS/6000 7043-140 boot floppies

[Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez]

Alan Perry via cctech wrote:
> The system does boot the AIX install on one of its hard disks, but 
> this is a recycled system and I don't have usernames/passwords for 
> that install.
>
> Does anyone here have a suggestion on how to proceed?
>
> alan
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.