IBM Powerstation 220

[Radix]

Well you could try a cable wired as per posts #54 and #59

 

[Thatsmanjear]

I have tried literally everything and can't get a terminal to display anything and looking at the display I don't see any 888 errors so I'm not sure what to try next.

Don't give up hope. I think the fun in these vintage machines is the *journey* and *challenge* of getting them running, more than the end result itself, unless it's a production machine you agreed to help somebody with...

If you look earlier in this thread you'll see I struggled mightily with getting mine to boot from CD-ROM. It must have a CD-ROM that supports 512-byte sectors, and even then not guaranteed to work, so try a different CD-ROM drive if you have access. Some of the older drives have a jumper to select 512 vs 2048 byte sectors. Also, the earlier RS/6000s seemed particularly sensitive to SCSI bus termination, so is your external drive terminated properly?

I had another RS/6000 barn find that I had trouble getting serial access, and it turned out it was configured for 19200 baud, which I would have expected to result in garbled characters, but it was just blank. Might try some different baud rates.

...and for sure make the cable @Radix suggested, they're smart guys, follow their advice. I can tell you that my 220 works with a normal crossover cable connected through a serial-usb adapter to a windows 11 machine using putty, but you're obviously isn't.

 

[Schafeman]

Definitely not giving up hope, I'm just used to things like Unix workstations (I have had and currently collect a large variety of them with the exception of RS/6000) having a very easy to configure and verbose serial console. I have quite a few older Toshiba CDROM drives that support 512k block size, as well as other brands. I just feel like I need to get to some sort of interactive boot rom in order to 'tell' the system where to find the install CD (or floppy, etc). I have my eyes on a parts system I'm trying to get that has at least a graphics card that I can stick in mine to make this much easier, so we'll see where that gets me. I really do appreciate all the help here!

 

[bear]

it will never display anything on any terminal if there is no OS to boot.

 

[Thatsmanjear]

You said in an earlier post that you have a 3.x CD that you tried to boot. Even though you couldn't see anything via terminal, did the CD drive show signs of it booting, like lots of drive light activity and sound of the drive head tracking along the CD-ROM? You also mention earlier you have Toshiba CD-ROM drives. I couldn't get my Toshiba to work, but eventually got it working with a Plextor. Make sure it is SCSI ID 6, 512 block size and terminated. If the CD isn't showing any signs of boot activity then it won't matter if you get a display adapter or terminal anyway. I think you're hoping you're eventually going to see a Sun-like OpenBOOT prom prompt so you can then do some configuration and issue a boot command. On your 230 you're going to need to boot an install CD to see anything, so work on that first.

I eventually tired of dealing with "real" SCSI devices anyway, so on my 220 I use a ZuluSCSI Compact RP2040. Simply copy the .iso of your AIX 3.x boot CD to the SD card and name it CD6_512.iso, and then just create a blank HD0.img file in the root of the SD of the size you'd like to be the hard drive.