[rescue] SGI I2 Impact rather cheap on eBay

[Dave McGuire]

On Wednesday, October 2, 2002, at 09:56 AM, Matthew Haas wrote:
>  Really, I've spent the better half of many a saturday trying drive 
> after
> drive with little to no success. Seagates, Quantums, IBMs... often 
> getting
> teased by having it be seen by the SGI, then only to spit out lots of
> errors saying it doesn't like the disklabel, or some other quibble. 
> (And
> this is when I'm in fx trying to format it). Trying to boot IRIX with 
> one
> of these drives is no different, I get lots of errors when booting.
>
>  But, if I take any one of these drives and put it in a SPARC, it works
> fine.
>
>  Not that it makes any difference... the Indigo2 & Indy were both older
> R4x00 model machines... could an older chipset be a possibility?

   Nope.  If anything, it'd have to do with the firmware, but I've done 
this with stuff as early as 100MHz R4K I^2 machines.

>  Just my $0.02, (and a fellow listmember can attest to this, as we were
> both monkeying with this). You seem to have had more luck, I wish my
> experience was as pleasant.

   Well let's try to figure out what's happening, then.  First, the 
block size of the drives...For certain perverted applications, some 
people reformat SCSI drives with other than 512-byte blocks.  Make sure 
the blocksize is 512.  I haven't seen fx in at least a year so my 
memory is fuzzy, but are you sure you're generating a good label and 
writing it out?  (not trying to sound condescending, I just don't know 
how familiar you are with fx)

        -Dave

--
Dave McGuire          "PC users only know two 'solutions'...
St. Petersburg, FL       reboot and upgrade."    -Jonathan Patschke