Can anybody clone the watchdog battery in an o350

3ddoc

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Jan 17, 2020
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title pretty much says it all. I have a o350 system that came to me missing the watchdog battery / chip.
pm please
 

weblacky

Active member
Jan 13, 2020
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Seattle, WA
Why is that an issue?

Please be more specific...you still buy snaphats for the controller RTC and you can still get the DALLAS L1 RTCs (see vvuk's thread). if both are gone...there is nothing to clone...if yours are dead...there is nothing to clone. You clone your data to a new chip to side-step NVRAM setup again...but that's minor unless you're running non-defaulted values. If you place SOMEONE else's cloned data in your NVRAM chip your system WILL simply either complain or overwrite it immediately because the serial wouldn't be right (serial mismatch). Plus you cannot clone a DEAD chip as it has no working battery to preserve contents...the only reason vvuk was even able to clone his is he mistakenly thought he had a dead L1 RTC..but the fact that is still has its data means...it's not dead...it was the snaphat (usual signs, wrong time in Irix and loss of NVRAM parameters are SNAPHAT not L1 RTC).

What do you expect to clone? You NEED a functional snaphat to run the controller RTC FIRST if you have both RTCs DEAD.

Once you have a working controller RTC (and have booted/power-on once), simply add a L1 RTC...if you want to keep a dead one in the O356 you can, you just need to be aware that the default parameters will be programmed on every boot, thus you may need a double boot (cold, then reboot) to start the system.

Modern SGIs can auto-program their serials (unless you're part of a rack system, where serials come from someplace like an L2). Serial is stored in the atmel chip with sysid and MAC address. The serial IS only copied to the RTCs, it's not it's native home. The Atmel chip beside the L1 RTC is its native home (non-volatile). However there is an order for the automation to work, so you CANNOT have BOTH RTCs with dead batteries, that confuses things.

This was proven on irixnet this year, cloning was done on several systems to prove there is only ONE failure point and it's on Tezro. If you place a USED L1 RTC from a Tezro into ANOTHER, different, Tezro it will NOT correctly wipe the chip and go weird without a working serial and halt, forcing you to fiddle with reprogramming the RTC or wiping it another SGI. Any other system will work correctly and even a Fuel RTC to a Tezro swap will wipe correctly. Only Tezro to Tezro will fail. O350 was tested as well, issue was not present...any old, used, L1 RTC can go into an O350 and will be wiped and provisioned correctly.

Unless it's part of a rack, then serial setup is 100% different and most people WANT dead L1 RTC due to this reason on racked O350.
 

3ddoc

Member
Jan 17, 2020
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I have a o350 with no dallas watchdog chip, snaphat in the io9 is fine.
I pulled the dallas chip from a working machine and tried it in my other 350 and it works fine
 

weblacky

Active member
Jan 13, 2020
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Seattle, WA
So you don’t need to clone anything? It reset the NVRAM, if you watched the console terminal output during first-use you should have seen an invalid serial or nvram warning and a re-init of nvram.
 

3ddoc

Member
Jan 17, 2020
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don't recall the message but I still need another Dallas chip to get my other machine working. I assume that it needs to be a clone of another o350 dallas chip, because I stuck one from another device, (0300) and it would not boot.
 

3ddoc

Member
Jan 17, 2020
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I believe I did, and then put the Dallas chip back in the original machine and it booted as well. I may go back and try it again, but don't want to burn the chip until I get a new one. I've never has a 350 that I couldn't change the serial number at will.
I've used the "carnage" command on 3900 and rbricks that were locked, life saver.

After reading the link you posted, it's pretty cleat that if you put in a cleared dallas chip your good to go, and hooked up to an l2 makes it a snap.
thanks to all
 

weblacky

Active member
Jan 13, 2020
181
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28
Seattle, WA
It should be, but using "used but working" RTCs does sometimes cause issues on NEWER SGIs (never on the old ones :). However if you own multiple SGIs you can solve your own issues without a programmer. Back in the day it was common for people having problem with Tezro L1 RTC to just throw the new chip in a Fuel for it's auto-init, then swap it into the Tezro and it would wipe and re-init the same chip just fine. We have seen serial issues block a few things but those can be resolved at the L1 manually.
 

3ddoc

Member
Jan 17, 2020
46
20
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Pulled one off a bad board in my scrap pile, popped it into my o350 and it came right up, was giving me a 12 v error message then, but I went into pod mode , initalllogs, clearalllogs and reset.
Came up with no errors on multiple boots.
So auto init only happens in the fuel, not tezro or o350?
 

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