Notes on installing Third Party Disk Drives in SGI's

One should NOT put the high speed (i.e. 7200RPM) drives INSIDE Indy's. These drives get way to hot and the Indy's can not push enought air through them to properly cool the drive. If one of these drives is put inside an Indy, the drive WILL burn itself out. If one wants to use these hot high speed drives with an Indy, get a well ventilated EXTERNAL enclosure with a good fan in it. These same drives HAVE been know to work fine inside Indigo2's. However, Dave Olson had the following coments on Seagate 4GB Barracuda's in Indigo2's:

You can put ONE 4GB barracuda in an Indigo2 (bottom slot, as that has the most air flow). Putting two (internally) is pushing your luck. Three (5.25" drive tray) is really, really pushing your luck.

It's true that more recent barracuda drives tend to run cooler than the original ones, but I'm not sure if they are enough cooler.

Two of the quantum 4GB or IBM Ultrastar drives isn't a problem, and 3 shouldn't be either, as long as you keep all the plastics on, so the airflow goes where it is supposed to.

Scott Henry updated things with this note:

(Ref. 7200 RPM 4GB drives) That is only true for the early drives which ran very hot. The current ones run a lot cooler. I have 2 Indys with QUANTUM XP34550WLXY4 (4.5G 7200RPM) drives, and they don't run noticably hotter than the 1GB drives that they replaced. I suspect that either now or very soon, the 10000RPM drives will be cool enough to run in an Indy.

Always try to keep the number of external enclosures/boxes to a MINIMUM, the fewer the number of boxes the better. Keep cables as short as possible, the shorter the better. Make sure only ONE device at the end of the chain is terminated and use an active terminator.

Remember, NEVER EVER FORMAT a SCSI drive. Its NOT necessary and can cause problems if you do.

Notes on installing a system disk from scratch and upgrading OS at same time

These are some of the steps I took when installing a new 4GB Seagate Barracuda in our Indigo2 and upgrading from IRIX 5.3 to 6.2 at the same time.

From prom monitor with installable CD in drive:

   boot -f dksc(0,3,8)sashARCS dksc(0,3,7)stand/fx.ARCS --x

Repartitioned 4GB drive as `root' drive as follows:

      part  type       cyls             blocks          Megabytes   (base+size)
        0: xfs        2 + 3479       4518 + 7859061       2 + 3837  (root)
        1: raw     3481 + 232     7863579 + 524088     3840 + 256   (swap)
        8: volhdr     0 + 2             0 + 4518          0 + 2
       10: volume     0 + 3713          0 + 8388315       0 + 4096

NOTE: Do not create an XFS log partition. It is NOT used by default and is therefore just wasted space.

Tried to do system install, was prompted to do a shell escape. Created new file system on drive

     #mkfs /dev/rdsk/dks0d1s0
     meta-data=/dev/rdsk/dks0d1s0     isize=256    agcount=8, agsize=122798 blks
     data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=982382, imaxpct=25
     log      = internal log          bsize=4096   blocks=1000
     realtime = none                  bsize=65536  blocks=0, rtextents=0

Escaped to inst menus and installed base OS. Shell escaped in inst.

        #rmdir tmp
        #ln -s /var/tmp /root/tmp

Editted /etc/TIMEZONE and set time zone to EST5EDT. Rebooted machine (ide & sash automatically installed in Volume Header) mounted old file system

     #mkdir /root_old
     #mount -v /dev/dsk/dks0d2s0 /root_old

Copied root user files.

     #cp -p /root_old/.cshrc /.cshrc
     #cp -p /root_old/.login /.login

Deleted OutOfBox account. Hid `EZsetup' and `4Dgifts' accounts and locked up all `standard' accounts

Editted /var/X11/xdm/xdm-config and changed all `terminateServer False' to True

Editted /var/X11/xdm/[Xsession,Xsession-remote,Xsession.dt] and changed all `xhost +' to `xhost -'

   chkconfig firsttimeprograms  off
   chkconfig gated              on
   chkconfig outbox             off
   chkconfig routed             off
   chkconfig rtnetd             on
   chkconfig timed              off
   chkconfig timeslave  on
   chkconfig verbose            on
   chkconfig vswap              on
   chkconfig whatsnew           off

Copied /root_old/etc/hosts to /etc/.
Copied /root_old/etc/config/timeslave.options to /etc/config/.
Copied /root_old/etc/resolv.conf to /etc/.
Copied /root_old/etc/config/ifconfig-1.options to /etc/config/.
Combined /root_old/etc/services with /etc/services to make new file.
In the file /etc/inetd.conf, commented out lines starting with: bootp bootparam http wn-http tftp

     #touch /var/adm/sulog
     #chmod o-r /var/adm/sulog

Merged /root_old/etc/syslog.conf with /etc/syslog.conf file.

Merged old /root_old/var/spool/cron/crontabs/root with new file.

Copied old /root_old/etc/default/login to new file.

      PASSREQ=YES
      UMASK=077
      TIMEOUT=60
      SLEEPTIME=1
      DISABLETIME=20
      MAXTRYS=4
      LOGFAILURES=3
      IDLEWEEKS=-1
      SYSLOG=ALL
      LOCKOUT=20

Copied old /root_old/etc/default/su to new file.

      CONSOLE=/dev/console
      SYSLOG=ALL

Copied old /root_old/etc/cshrc to new file.

Editted /etc/inetd.conf and changed the following line:

      shell     stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/etc/rshd   rshd -aL

Brent Bates' other notes on installing third party hardware on SGI's:

Working CD-ROM Drive Poll ,

Tape Drives,

Hard Disks,

Joysticks,

Magneto Opticals,

Memory,

CDR's (Writeable CD-ROM's)

If you have any additions, corrects, or updates to the above information, please email me at: blbates@vigyan.com, thanks.

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Last update: May 14, 2002