[rescue] External CDROM drive for Indigo2

[Sheldon T. Hall]

"Tom 'spot' Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> sez...
> I recently acquired an Indigo2, but it doesn't have any input mechanism
> (no floppy/cdrom). I know I can tftp boot it, but I'd like to have a
> working cdrom drive attached to it.
>
> All I have in the arena of external SCSI cdrom drives are Sun drives, and
> they don't seem to work properly on the system at all (they definitely
> don't boot). Googling led me to a lot of older information, I was hoping
> the list would be a bit more up to date.

I got my Indigo2 over the summer, but it took some time for me to get OS
media for it.  I didn't know Sun CD-ROM drives wouldn't work, so that's what
I used, and it worked fine.  Actually, the drive was a Plextor 20x drive
that I was uing on my SPARCstation LX, and it both booted and installed IRIX
just fine.  Well, it did once I figured out the IRIX install program, which
is rather ... unique.

If you want something that will play CD-audio-over-SCSI, you're pretty much
limited to early Toshiba drives or SGI OEM drives.  There are several files
on the 'net discussing what drives work to what extent, and how to modify
the early generic Toshibas to boot SGIs and do audio-over-SCSI.

What I've got at the moment is an old Toshiba 4X caddy drive in the top
internal bay, and a much faster Imation (Plextor) CD-R drive externally.
The Toshiba drive is mostly to play audio ....

-Shel