R3K SGI Indigo & installing IRIX 5.3

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Mon Jul 5 06:38:19 2004

Blah! OK, the Indigo doesn't like my old Apple SCSI CDROM drive, even
though the Indy and my Sun Ultra 1 do... luckily I had a spare
quad-speed drive which has a sector-size jumper on the back. (So it
wasn't a bad SCSI cable or a problem with the Indigo's external SCSI
connector as it turns out)

Anyway, I'm just trying to get IRIX 5.3 from CD onto a disk in the
Indigo (one which currently has a mangled copy of 5.3 on it). I've used
the same CD to install 5.3 on the Indy previously - just not tried it
with the Indigo...

If I go view the PROM monitor and select "Install System Software", then
use the CDROM as the source device, it copies the installation program
to disk, says complete, but then dies with:

  "Unable to load dksc(0,1,1)unix.IP12: file not found"

I seem to recall the Indy doing the same thing, which I think was a disk
partition problem (as in that case I was installing onto a drive that
had previously been in a PC)

So, I restarted at this time went into the PROM monitor's command
monitor and did:

  "boot -f dksc(0,6,8)sashARCS dksc(0,6,7)stand/fx.ARCS"

... which was what I used for the Indy to partition the drive. On the
Indigo it just blows up with:

  72912
  NESTED EXCEPTION at pc: bfc11d90, first exception at bfc11d90

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? Given that the Indigo's an R3K and the
Indy is an R4K, do I need a different boot command to load the relevant
R3K software?

I know this Indigo works - but the release of 5.3 is a copied version
that came with the Indy... maybe it's missing something I need, or maybe
SGI did different 5.3 releases for R3K and R4K machines?

cheers

Jules
Received on Mon Jul 05 2004 - 06:38:19 BST