SGI Prism: Linux not booting up

[Gloxin]

Hello guys, as you can see I am new to this forum but I have been collecting SGI computers for as long as I can remember. I recently uneartherd my Prism which was stored in my basement for quite some time now and when I turned it on I noticed that Boot Manager ver 1.10 (14.62) loaded and I was presented with 3 booting options which are as follow:

. SuSE SLES
. EFI Shell (Built-In)
. Boot Option maintenance menu

So, I selected option number 1, as always and to my suprise it just frozed up on me.

Strange because it first seem like everything was actually going smoothy smooth. Reason I say this is because I saw this:

ELILO boot : Uncompressing Linux... done
Loading initrd... done

And this is as far as it went. From this point forward it is basically stuck here with absolutely zero progress.

Can any of you Wizards out there shed some light here and explain to me what exactly is going on with my system ?

thanks in advance...

 

[stormy]

I am not a Prism expert, but in general you can get screwy issues on most systems when the prom/nvram battery is dead. So unless anyone has any better idea, that's the first thing I'd check.

edit: since it might not be sgi specific of an issue, might be worth reading forum threads with people who have experienced similar issues, like this one for example: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/elilo-boot-freeze-4175712390/

 

[7spirals]

Try booting it off optical media. Do you get the same symptom? If so, I'd suspect something wrong with the hardware, if not, I'd suspect that initrd you are loading is damaged, corrupt, or otherwise invalid. You're also missing a lot of kernel ring buffer messages between when the boot loader loads the kernel and the message about it loading initrd. They might have been suppressed by the boot loader flags or they might be going out to a serial port. Finding where those messages are going might also give you more diagnostics about what is happening and where the boot process is hanging up.

 

[Gloxin]

Try booting it off optical media. Do you get the same symptom? If so, I'd suspect something wrong with the hardware, if not, I'd suspect that initrd you are loading is damaged, corrupt, or otherwise invalid. You're also missing a lot of kernel ring buffer messages between when the boot loader loads the kernel and the message about it loading initrd. They might have been suppressed by the boot loader flags or they might be going out to a serial port. Finding where those messages are going might also give you more diagnostics about what is happening and where the boot process is hanging up.

I have completely lost all of the discs that came with Prism. Do you know where can I download the specific Linux version that is compatible with Prism so that I can burn it to a CD ? And is this even an option ? Thanks.

 

[dancingfools]

Hello, have you pm