[rescue] More IRIX questions: why won't it boot from my 6.5.24 CDs?

[Kevin]

I've had many Plextor drives work and some old "double speed" Apple drives
(Matsushita) work just fine on all my SGIs.  I've heard of people having
success with various Toshiba drives as well.

Hitting Ebay with "SGI SUN CDROM" usually results in fairly cheap options.

Are you using SGI media or CDRs?  As stated here, i'm sure it could be
done, but i've never had success using burned media for foundation
installs.  Once you get a base OS on there, it's all gravy from then on
out.

With the way things have gone with IRIX and SGI, it might be advantageous
for us to spend some time trying to figure out how to successfully copy the
EFS CDs into an image that could be copied using any platform....


On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 16:18:04 -0700
"Sheldon T. Hall" <shel at tandem.artell.net> wrote:

> Micah R Ledbetter writes ...
> > On Apr 7, 2007, at 17:31, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> > 
> > > Is the CD-ROM drive jumpered to use 512-byte sectors, rather than  
> > > the usual
> > > 2048?  This jumper is often called "block" on the drive case.
> > 
> > Ah hah. Changing CDROM drives to 512-byte sectors fixes this. (I  
> > don't think that my first drive had such a jumper... I couldn't find  
> > one, anyway)
> 
> SGI machines are rather picky about CD-ROM drives, as suggested by the
> amount of net-foo-foo you can Google up.  They are much more picky about
> boot drives (and bootable CD-ROM disks) than they are about day-to-day
disk
> reading, but they are semi-picky there, as well.  
> 
> However, the more recent SGI machines (say mid-1990s onward) aren't
nearly
> as bad as the earlier ones were, and, of course, CD-ROM drives have
> improved, too.  Still, it ain't like PCs, where any IDE CD drive will
Just
> Work.
> 
> A drive that SGI shipped with the machine will work, of course, and, as a
> bonus, it's very likely to do audio-over-SCSI.  However, rescuable SGI
boxes
> mostly shipped with 2x caddy drives, and that makes the usual 15-CD IRIX
> install-to-current-plus-freeware session rather tedious.
> 
> I have attached various CD and DVD drives to my SGIs (Indy, Indigo2,
Octane,
> Challenge L).  Most of them boot from an appropriate CD disk if jumpered
to
> 512 byte sectors.  This includes some drives as fast as "32x", which
makes
> installing IRIX a lot faster than on the normal 2x drives shipped with,
say,
> the Challenge.  Even one of the DVD drives I have will boot my Octande.
> Neither of the DVD drives is that good about reading actual DVDs on the
> Octane, though.  I've read that this is a problem with the mediad
program,
> as is a reported difficulty with reading CD-RW disks in some drives.
> 
> To add to the SGI Compact Disk Mystique, the dam' machines will only boot
> from EFS-formatted boot CDs, and making those on anything but an SGI is a
> Black Art.  
> 
> Given that SGI didn't care to fix this when MIPS/IRIX was alive, it's
> probably a situation we'll have to live with.
> 
> Once, for amusement value, I hooked up a Nakamichi 6-disk changer to my
> Indigo 2.  The OS saw it as 7 drives, but that was the extent of its
> usefulness.  Rather than actually read any disks I put in it, the OS (or
> mediad, I don't know) just endlessly shuffled from one disk to the next
> until I turned off the drive.  I was really sorry it didn't work better,
as
> I had visions of the changer being, essentially, a sort of portable,
plug-in
> install server.
> 
> Once you get IRIX 6.5.whatever installed, be sure to apply the inst patch
> before you try in install the update to 6.5.22 from SGI's website.
> 
> -Shel
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue


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