RISC6000 7007 POWERportable N40

From: Truthan,Larry <truthanl_at_oclc.org>
Date: Fri Jan 12 05:33:34 2001

Well Pat,

The "66" entry is invalidated in the 10 element diagnostic menu and the sub
menues under each element. The initial sevice selection is "language
select"). I havent tried "66" at the language select. On the first pass, I
am not making headway with your suggestion.

I appreciate your experience, and your willingness to seek the collaboration
of others, who may recall the process.

The spiral bound AIX 3.2.5 release notes speak of restoring the factory
build by connecting the N40 ethernet AUI port to a Host, and mounting the
N40 3.2 AIX CD on a host based cdrom volume.

I assume the host must be another AIX machine(?) (Or can it be on an FTP
server?) The release notes speak of command line "mounting" the cdrom
volume over the link -not running an FTP client session on the N40.

SO far I've not connected the ethernet AUI port to another machine.
I was thinking of using the service diagnostic ethernet test menu to
configure the IP addresses of the source and destination machines. Just for
the sake of connecting the N40 back to a Win98 PC and "Pinging" the remote
PC.

Then perhaps I can find an i386 based version of AIX to convert the PC to an
AIX host, to harbor the N40's 3.2.5 AIX CDROM. Then, proceed with that
learning environment. ANY free or cheap sources for early i386 AIX?

I gather that IBM has dropped support for the N40, 3.2 AIX, and even some
later versions of AIX. I am simply trying to make myself a small learning
environment. From what I've seen this is a 6.9 pound network workstation.

Sincerely
Larry Truthan

-----Original Message-----
From: Pat Barron [mailto:pat_at_transarc.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2001 6:10 PM
To: Truthan,Larry
Subject: Re: RISC6000 7007 POWERportable N40


Booting in Service Mode will bring up a menu of diagnostics and service
aids. There is an undocumented, "invisible" choice on that menu, which I
*think* is "66" (each choice is numbered, and number 66 should be the
"hidden" option), which will dump you directly to a shell prompt.

Now, however, you *may* have some challenges ahead before you can reset
the root password. Depending on how the system actually gets you into
Service Mode, you may find that the root volume group is not varied on,
and that none of the filesystems are mounted. At the shell prompt, try
typing the following commands:

    # mountall
    # ls

If "ls" is found and produces output, then you are set - use the "ed"
editor to edit /etc/security/passwd, and remove the "password =" line
from root's entry in the file. This will clear root's password. You can
then reboot the machine in Normal Mode, log in as root with no password,
and then set the password in the usual way.

If "ls" is not found, or if the output doesn't look like there are enough
files there, then the root filesystem isn't there. Do "echo /*", "echo
/bin/*", "echo /sbin/*", etc, to give you an idea of what's available. In
that case, you'll need to go through a sequence similar to the following
to get into the filesystem (note that it's been a *long* time since I've
done this, and this isn't guaranteed to be even remotely correct,
and which may screw up your Object Data Manager if it goes wrong, so
beware....):

   # importvg hdisk0
   # varyonvg rootvg
   # mount /dev/hd4 /mnt
   # cd /mnt/etc/security

And then work on the "passwd" file with whatever tools you can use....

If this doesn't help, let me know, and I can probably find some other
folks around here who might remember.....

--Pat.
Received on Fri Jan 12 2001 - 05:33:34 GMT