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SGI O2 SCSI drive issues

tsengalb

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Joined
Mar 9, 2020
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11
Location
Los Angeles, SFBA
I'm trying to reset the root password of a SGI O2 by mounting the drive and editing it with a PC. The O2 has a 80 pin SCA drive, and the PC has an Adaptec card with a 50 pin ribbon. I'm using a cheap SCA to 50 pin adapter that I purchased off of ebay, with the SCSI ID set to 0 (no jumpers attached). When I boot the PC, the SCSI card hangs and eventually prints a dump (attached) and fails to recognize the drive. I've attached other 50 pin drives to this card without issue, so I'm wondering if the issue is with the SCA to 50 pin adapter or something else. I have no idea how to debug Adaptec SCSI card dumps, so if anyone wants to take a look at the dump (attached) that would be very helpful.
 

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I'm assuming you are at least using Fast-Wide SCSI or an equivalent to UltraSCSI all the way through because SCA drives by that point became hit and miss if you tried forcing them into LVD/SE mode.

Also a reminder that Irix uses the XFS filesystem and it varies enough from "modern" XFS enough that it's often not possible for Linux much less Windows to mount it.
If you do not have access to another SGI my suggestion is load a miniroot from a CD, mount the filesystem and blow it away from there.
 
Can you elaborate on the difference between SCSI types and how it would affect me here (card compatability, etc)? I'm not entirely familiar with SCSI.

Regarding XFS, my "trick" is to generate a new root password with crypt and then sed a dump of the disk with the new password (linux is only able to mount EFS and probably XFS read only), thus overwriting it while preserving alignment etc. Once I get the root password I can boot the machine and reset things from there. I've done this on a few other SGI machines (all older ones with 50 pin drives) so it works quite reliably.
 
Unless you do that from an alternate hard disk or the miniroot, for obvious reasons you cannot boot the machine into single user mode like that. It will ask for the root password.
 
It may also be possible that, depending on the version installed, the file system is EFS instead of XFS. In that case I don't know of a Linux file system for that and a single user boot or miniroot boot is required.
 
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