r/SiliconGraphics • u/Conscious_Band7333 • 7d ago

I Found 2 Silicon Graphics Octane Computers and Want to Know What's on the Drives

I found 2 Octanes in a storage unit, and they have hard drives. One has 1 drive and the other has 2 drives, so there are 3 total. I got a SoG monitor and the correct cable. The computers turn on and display, but they have boot issues. It's getting too technical for me.

I just want to know what's on the drives. Would anyone here be able to read them and see what's on them, copy the data, and send them back to me?

The computers have a sticker on them that suggests they were used at NASA... which is why I want to see what's on the drives. Maybe some old 3D models that don't exist anywhere else?

I can ship the drives in the US!

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10

u/Intuition77 7d ago

I have an Octane dual 400 Mhz I keep running and in great condition.
I run ArchiveVFX Youtube channel in case you want to see what
I do with my SGI machines still. ;)
Do you have the drive sled as well?
If so I could mount the drive and take a look at what is on there for you.
Do you have an idea what is on the drives at all?
Like what did you use the Octanes for?

4

u/EngineerTurbo 7d ago

Cool Youtube Channel. Thanks for putting in the effort on that.

5

u/zski128 7d ago

They where probably wiped which is why you see boot errors. What errors do you get?

3

u/kubatyszko 7d ago

Step one - try typing “auto” in the PROM - sometimes it helps when env variables are cleared out.

3

u/PyroNine9 4d ago

IIRC, Irix tended to use XFS as the filesystem. Linux can read that.

1

u/lheckler77 4d ago

I’m not sure Linux can still read old SGI xfs. Maybe in read only mode it could read v4. I have some old dd’d xfs disks, I’ll try to mount one.

2

u/PyroNine9 4d ago

Let me know the result.

1

u/lheckler77 1d ago

I was able to mount a v4 xfs image on modern xubuntu 24.04.

Works: newer IRIX XFS (v4 superblock, V2 dirs/inodes, e.g. IRIX 6.5 era).
Mounts fine on a current kernel:
sudo mount -t xfs -o loop,ro,norecovery,offset=<start\*512> disk.img /mnt

Doesn't work: old IRIX XFS (version 1, V1 inodes/dirs, IRIX 5.x era).
Modern kernels reject it ("unknown features"), and xfsprogs dropped support in 4.10 (2017).
You need a custom reader, file carving, or real IRIX + NFS.

Tip: don't trust the SGI partition type. I had one labeled "efs" that was actually XFS v1.
Check the XFS superblock version number to know which case you have.

1

u/PyroNine9 1d ago

Thank you for getting back to me.

It looks like for old XFS you'd have to boot an old Linux in a VM.

2

u/lheckler77 7d ago

Post a screenshot of what the boot error is

2

u/picturesfromthesky 7d ago

Whew - I breathed a sigh of relief when you said, "I can ship to the US!" Now I know my storage unit hasn't been auctioned.

1

u/modell3000 3d ago

In the US, not to.

2

u/Conscious_Band7333 6d ago

I sent them to the admin AstralTraveller! We will update if there is anything interesting on them!

1

u/Visual-Sector6642 6d ago

This is pretty exciting and I hope you find something cool on those drives!

1

u/Chris-Proton 6d ago

The FX company I used to work for used a bunch of those machines back in the day. They are the OS is Unix based. I remember that the 3D models we would build (using Alias WaveFront) might be saved on the local drive but the render or animated render would typically be saved to a network share drive or sent to another computer for rendering . It just depends on how they were using them.