RS6k 7012/320H woes

[Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez]

Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez wrote:
> Still, no luck making the console work; the 320H does not assert DTR 
> or RTS even though it is seeing DSR, CTS, and DCD asserted.
>
> 2) I cleaned the floppy drive (it wasn't that dirty), re-wrote the 
> four aix diagnostics floppies and tried them once more in service 
> mode.  The same thing happened: it reads the complete first disk 
> (apparently without error), but then it goes again to read the hard 
> drive and stalls in the same spot.  Does anybody have images of 
> diagnostics floppies that would be known to work in a 320H?
>
> 3) I now have AIX 4.3.3 install CDs.  Does the 320H expect a CDROM 
> drive to be at a specific SCSI ID?
>
> Carlos.
>
I have made some progress here.  I imaged the original hard drive and by 
searching this image in bvi I found that the
original AIX version in it is AIX 3.1.     I found another set of 
BOSboot diskettes on the net, but for AIX 3.2, and some
advice about not running the getrootfs script in the maintenance shell 
of V3.2 in a V3.1 system.  I was able to boot the
maintenance shell off these diskettes (Finally the console came up! My 
console cable and my MODU serial connector
kludge were fine).  I figured a way to mount the hard drive's partitions 
in this ramdisk-based maintenance shell and
get around the very limited commands in this shell (no ed, ex, vi, ls, 
or many others) to modify /etc/security/passwd,
/etc/inittab to something basic.   I found that there is no /sbin or 
/usr/sbin in this hard drive, but then I noticed that
most of the commands that usually reside in those directories were to be 
found in /etc .  With one major omission:  there
is no /etc/mount anywhere to be found.  I found that the programs in the 
hard drive bomb immediately ("Killed") in
the V3.2 maintenance shell, so I believe that they are 
binary-incompatible.  After all of this, I was able to boot
(partiallly, see below) the machine and log in the root account. But, 
since the mount command is missing,
the file systems in /etc/filesystems were not mounted, so I do not have 
access to /usr .  I copied the /etc/mount
command in the V3.2 maintenance shell to /etc/mount in the hard drive, 
but this command also bombs under V 3.1.
So, I need a copy of the /etc/mount binary from AIX V3.1 .  I think that 
I can mount a DOS floppy and transfer
this binary that way (this system does not have a network card). Or, I 
can copy the /usr/bin/uudecode binary from
the /usr partition to /etc/uudecode in the root partition while in the 
maintenance shell and then use that to get the
binary while under V3.1 .

So, does anybody have access to an AIX V3.1 /etc/mount binary?

My inittab generates some errors, all of which seem to be attributable 
to the fact that /usr is not mounted.

Eventually, I will probably install AIX 4.3.3, but first I need to get 
more SD2SCSI devices, so that will take a while.

carlos.