[Full text included, to give Bernd Sieker a chance to catch up :]


In article <20050403213303.GA3773@olib.org> you wrote:
> 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.

As far as I understood, these machines don't have a "normal" PC BIOS, but 
an ARC BIOS as found on the SGI (-> NetBSD/sgimips) machines. This will 
need writing a completely new boot mechanism (access disks & display, find 
memory, etc.) to get the machine going.

Maybe Bernd can tell more here, he has/had such a machine...


 - Hubert

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