[rescue] SGI: Booting Help (Personal Iris)

[Dan Canaan]

Machine:  Personal Iris 4D/25
OS: Irix 5.3
Problem: Unable to get to single user mode

Getting to single user mode should be easy.  And by all accounts it really 
is, but something is halting my progress.  I've got five 4D/25's and they 
all fail in the same fashion.  They do a system check, look for name 
servers which are not there (used systems), and eventually dump you at a 
nice login screen.  Cool.  No way of getting the password though for root.

Okay, let's try getting into the menu/monitor system.  Power up, hit ESC 
and we get the monitor.  Let's go into the last option, 5- command 
monitor.  Cool.

Going to single user mode ('single') will start loading the file system, 
failing on the superblock and recovers.  Eventually we'll get an option for 
a run level- whatever that is.  0-5, plus S.  Huh.

Okay, let's try sash.  Hey, that works!  Unfortunately sash doesn't really 
give you anything at all to work with.  I'm not sure what to do once I get 
into that mode.  It can't load anything beyond that.

I refuse to believe all five machines failing in the same way are all 
bad.  There's something I'm missing that is basic here.  I haven't even 
gotten to the point where I need to or could change the root password as 
the file system isn't fully mounted.  My goal would be to hook up an 
external SCSI CD-ROM (512 byte mode) as ID 4 or something.  Then try going 
to sash and booting to the CD-ROM. I *think* that may work, but so far even 
getting a CD-ROM drive to be recognized has been tricky.

Suggestions?

-Vegaman Dan
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