I have a short-term chance to poke a little bit at an SGI 540.
These are SMP systems built around 500MHz Xeon CPUs.  I don't
expect to run NetBSD much on one of these, but thought that it
might be a good thing to try to boot with NetBSD.  (For one thing,
the system has a MonopolySoft OS installed.  I thought that it
would be interesting to swap with a NetBSD-installed drive and
see what happens.)

There are two problems:

I couldn't swap drives since I was initially told that I would
just be examining this system, and assumed a cheap PC clone.
I didn't bring a SCSI drive, which seems to be what the thing
wants.

I could not see how to get it to boot from anything but the
built-in hard drive.  (I wanted to run memtest86+, for example.
A "Live" type of CD would also be nice.)


Does anyone have any personal experience with these things?
The person that currently has it picked it up second-hand
and doesn't seem to know a whole lot about computers.  He's
more of a digial media person.

I checked around on the Internet some.  Someone gave some
instructions for installing GNU/LINUX over the MS OS, but
I don't want to wipe out what's there---so I'm reluctant
to follow the instructions given.

Also, some sources suggested that a generic PC clone kernel
wouldn't run ont (not for GNU/LINUX, anyway).  Though it
apparently has been ported.  (Someone summarized the
thing's PC compatibility as ending at the CPU pins...(^&)

Any useful insight would be appreciated.

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/