[rescue] SGI: PI Boot issues

[Dan Canaan]

Machine: Personal Iris 4D/25
OS: Irix 5.3

Problem:  Installing anything from sash.

I have five of these critters and all of them have valid hard drives, but 
it looks like when they are booting that they are trying to go out and snag 
their OS from another machine that is no longer available.  They hang 
trying to look for some servers that simply aren't there anymore.  I can go 
into the PROM and from there get into sash, but that's about it.  I can't 
seem to get to the CD-ROM drive I mounted externally at all.  Since the 
main hard drive is booting from (0,1,1) and (0,1,8), reason stands that if 
I have a bootable CD (Irix 5.3 install media) in the CD-ROM drive at ID 4 
that I should be able to check out (0,4,8).

That doesn't seem to work.  I get all sorts of errors if I try that.  If I 
just try to ls dksc((0,4,1), it won't find anything. In fact, it can't find 
anything on any partition except for 8, and that returns unrecoverable 
errors.  If I try that on the main drive at ID 1,  I can find the bootable 
sash partition along with SGI_LABEL which is on partition 1.  Hmph.  I am 
using a 512 byte mode CD-ROM drive and have parity enabled.  It *should* be 
recognized, as I bought this drive with this purpose in mind.

Right now I've got five big brown boxes that make great table legs, but not 
so good of computers.

Is Irix 5.3 bootable from the install media?  Any ideas on how to get a 
miniroot going on the main drive?  Can a Sun read a hard drive formatted 
for Irix?


-Vegaman Dan
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