IBM RS6000 model 370 type 7012

Hello everyone
I picked up this up a long time ago, and recently got it to the point it would power on, and seems to boot up.
I've connected my terminal to "Serial 1" and after waiting a long time, I see the AIX OS boot and stops at the login prompt, so I'm not able to see the specs.
I of course don't have the credentials to log in, and I've tried switching to "service" mode but do not get any output on the serial port at all to try and get any further.

My question is, how do I redirect the "post" to the serial1 port so I can actually boot off a floppy , etc ?

Another question is what MCA video cards are supported in this, that you can actually find these days?

I have a MCA - XGA2 video card, would that work to "post" the system? (I don't think AIX has drivers for it, so don't expect it work any further than that), but haven't tried it incase I end up foobaring something.

thanks for any info
Jonathan

My memory is foggy on these - you might have to do something like boot from the floppy drive or a tape drive to be able to work around the lack of a password.

These were "hot rods" in their day. I started my career with a Model 340, and we all lusted after the Model 370. Especially the 320 users. ;-0

I have a tape drive I could use, im just not sure how i'd even say hey, 370, boot off that tape drive!

I suppose I really need a graphics card in it to see, it has keyboard, mouse ps2 ports, but no gfx! Gah. Tempted to try the XGA2, but I doubt a PC MCA part would work in the RS6k world...

Were these machines SMP at all? The "cpu" card has 6 chips with heatsinks on em, and a few without, other than that I can't really tell which is the CPU...

Very cool looking ole machine, very similar to : https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/ibm-rs-6000-7012-340.78834/

Jonathan

There is a way to get them to boot from floppy or tape even if there is a local hard drive. Once again, it escapes my memory but there are enough old RS/6000 fans around. (Just maybe not here though ...)

These are definitely not SMP machines. It might be what they call a "multi-chip module" where the CPU is actually a few chips. Six chips for a module seems excessive though; some of that might be a cache controller.

You probably should start here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/rs6000/

Regardless of console, there is no output during self-test. Only the front panel LED codes.

All of (more or less) the chips on the CPU board together are "the CPU".

Neither an XGA nor XGA-2 will be of any use with the RS/6000.

If you intend to get unprotected access to the filesystem to manipulate the password, you need to boot an installation medium (tape is traditional; I have seen some floppies but I do not believe they are sufficient on their own) and use that to access a "maintenance shell" (which is one of the normal menu options available prior to performing the installation). I do not believe the diagnostics floppies offer this (though I do not recall specifically).

If you need to boot something other than the normal hard drive (such as an install tape) you need to have the switch in the "Service" position. This causes the machine to use the "stored service mode boot list", instead of the normal or secure mode boot lists. The normal mode list will not normally have anything in it except the installed system on whichever hard drive. The service mode list normally searches for various removable media first. It is possible, however, the service mode boot list has been cleared, or currently specifies only devices that are no longer available. The (previously mentioned) diagnostics will allow you to set, clear, or re-set any stored boot list however you like.

jc179 said:

I have a tape drive I could use, im just not sure how i'd even say hey, 370, boot off that tape drive!

I suppose I really need a graphics card in it to see, it has keyboard, mouse ps2 ports, but no gfx! Gah. Tempted to try the XGA2, but I doubt a PC MCA part would work in the RS6k world...

Were these machines SMP at all? The "cpu" card has 6 chips with heatsinks on em, and a few without, other than that I can't really tell which is the CPU...

Very cool looking ole machine, very similar to : https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/ibm-rs-6000-7012-340.78834/

Jonathan

Click to expand...

Isn't this a early power machine ? If so, that CPU is a multiple dies in different packages CPUs, and compared with other RISC CPU's from that era it's instruction set is COMPLICATED.

bear said:

Regardless of console, there is no output during self-test. Only the front panel LED codes.

All of (more or less) the chips on the CPU board together are "the CPU".

Neither an XGA nor XGA-2 will be of any use with the RS/6000.

If you intend to get unprotected access to the filesystem to manipulate the password, you need to boot an installation medium (tape is traditional; I have seen some floppies but I do not believe they are sufficient on their own) and use that to access a "maintenance shell" (which is one of the normal menu options available prior to performing the installation). I do not believe the diagnostics floppies offer this (though I do not recall specifically).

If you need to boot something other than the normal hard drive (such as an install tape) you need to have the switch in the "Service" position. This causes the machine to use the "stored service mode boot list", instead of the normal or secure mode boot lists. The normal mode list will not normally have anything in it except the installed system on whichever hard drive. The service mode list normally searches for various removable media first. It is possible, however, the service mode boot list has been cleared, or currently specifies only devices that are no longer available. The (previously mentioned) diagnostics will allow you to set, clear, or re-set any stored boot list however you like.

Click to expand...

thanks for confirming there's no expected output during post codes.
I managed to find a "bootdisk" which boots to a menu, where I can set the boot order for normal and service mode.
It has a shell prompt option as well, however, that requires me to know the existing root password.
I tried the installation disk, and it booted to the same menu? Somewhat unexpected, I'm suspecting something else is up with the fdd drive, even though it passes diagnostics read/write to floppy on all tracks on a good disk.

After much more digging it seems my options are to boot from a cdrom (maybe), tape, or lastly a non_autoinstall "mksysb " which I suspect I need a working AIX to make a boot disk. Perhaps installing a 2nd hdd and loading AIX fresh will let me make one. At this point its hard to say if its worth it to keep the old aix install.

thanks
Jonathan

stefan-lokeldarn said:

Isn't this a early power machine ? If so, that CPU is a multiple dies in different packages CPUs, and compared with other RISC CPU's from that era it's instruction set is COMPLICATED.

Click to expand...

Ah that's pretty neat then. I don't think I will be doing any instruction asm coding on these, just tinkering about really.

I have a RS6K model 250 here as well, seems to me its speed is about the same, from the same era, and has what you'd typically expect to find one big chip with a heatsink, or so far as I can tell. Too bad its power supply quit... : / I was going to borrow its video card, but it is some special interface (not MCA, but sort of using a riser plugin to the mainboard).

Jonathan

A RS6000 250 is a PowerPC machine so a somewhat simplified POWER1.

mbbrutman said:

These were "hot rods" in their day. I started my career with a Model 340, and we all lusted after the Model 370. Especially the 320 users. ;-0

Click to expand...

Did "7012" refer to a product line of which there were several different sub models with different performance levels?

Around 15 years ago I had some 7012-320 20MHz and 7012-320H 25MHz desktops, and 7013-520 20MHz deskside systems. Even back then they seemed slow enough that they weren't much fun to do any tinkering with. I forget if I was able to re-home any of them at the time, or if I ended up dropping them all of at an recycler. I kept the couple of 3151 serial terminals they came with, and still have those.

Managed to get the machine up and running. Floppy drive was working, somewhat. I replaced the usual suspects 4.7uf and 10uf caps on it, and it worked for a little bit, but still wasn't booting off the drive. While I did the caps, I noticed the 2nd board had a lot of corrosion on it as well. In a feeble attempt to "help" things I poured IPA on it and wiped it clean. I feel I shouldn't have done that, and stopped at just replacing the 2 caps on the motor board. After doing it, when I read a disk now, it seems one head is in op, based on a WAG;

For example if run diagnostics;
Diskette Media Service Aid
Diskette Capacity 2880
Sectors Checked 252
Sectors reported bad 126
Sectors reported good 126

Kinda bummer, I suspect maybe a trace or something was barely holding on, and after cleaning, well it no longer existed or vaporized. That's fine ill find that, hopefully it is that case, and not the case that the head amplifier was wet, and that was only made worse with my fiddling. If these drives were items a plenty id have just bounced it off the wall on its way to the bin, but I feel compelled to fix it one day when I have more free time and patience to resume on that.

I gave up and decided to use a SCSI cdrom and boot off a cd, that worked and in a pinch I was able to reset the login for root and use the OS. Sadly it seems the en0/ent0 onboard nic is dead (does not recieve any packets in netstat -in), so I put in a 10/100 nic (8f62) and found out that only works under Aix 4.3, not the present Aix 3.2, which I'd like to keep running on this 66 mhz cpu. Maybe its possible to get this newer nic to work in the old Aix 3.2, from what I was able to find, the drivers were only released for Aix 4 and beyond... so probably not.

Anyways my next bonehead move, after getting the machine up and running, I decided to backup the OS disk to a flat file using linux/dd , but I should have tested that before fiddling with the OS more. I made a mistake, and messed up the OS disk trying to write a new volume group to it... damn it.

Writing the DD image back to the hard drive, but it no longer boots (stops at LED display 223 so transfered IPL to scsi but no ones home. I suspect I need to figure out how to write a new boot sector to the disk, somehow it seems that probably this didn't copy back properly ? No idea?

I can boot off the AIX cdrom, and issue a getrootfs, and it does find hdisk0 .

However, I can mount that disk using getrootfs -f hdisk0 , it iimports the rootvg, and I browse the file system, edit files, etc, but I am not sure how I can get the machine to boot off this disk again...

Any ideas anyone ?

thanks,
Jonathan

gslick said:

Did "7012" refer to a product line of which there were several different sub models with different performance levels?

Around 15 years ago I had some 7012-320 20MHz and 7012-320H 25MHz desktops, and 7013-520 20MHz deskside systems. Even back then they seemed slow enough that they weren't much fun to do any tinkering with. I forget if I was able to re-home any of them at the time, or if I ended up dropping them all of at an recycler. I kept the couple of 3151 serial terminals they came with, and still have those.

Click to expand...

I think you are right thought I haven't seen much, there seem to be many 7012 designations; The particular one I have has the CPU on a card, which probably was interchangeable with others. Wish I knew more... Of course, as luck would have it, years ago we all got rid of neat things we're after today : (

7012-320
7012-360
7012-370
7012-390

Update: Managed to get myself out of trouble, did some digging and found a command called

bosboot in combination with the switches -ad hdisk0 got things going again

Step summary
Boot off Aix cdrom, select option #4 maintenance shell
1. getrootfs hdisk0
2. bosboot -ad hdisk0

should see some text like below if success
bosboot: Boot image is 11225 512 byte blocks

Now to backup the disk, using proper smit, and then clean it up and move stuff around!
:banghead:

Do you have images of the maintenance disks and of your hard drive?
I have a 7016/360 I am working on right now. I believe both of our Systems are POWER1 the disks might be compatible.
I was told that there is microcode on the HDD that needs to be loaded for the machine to do anything (though that may be for the earlier machines like the 320 can't remember)
I have been trying to use ddrescue to recover my HDD and only managed to get about 20% of the random spots of the drive before it started screaming for death. I have a few service disks myself for that aforementioned 320 that I still need to image, need to find my rig that does that from the move...

KD2IXL said:

Do you have images of the maintenance disks and of your hard drive?
I have a 7016/360 I am working on right now. I believe both of our Systems are POWER1 the disks might be compatible.
I was told that there is microcode on the HDD that needs to be loaded for the machine to do anything (though that may be for the earlier machines like the 320 can't remember)
I have been trying to use ddrescue to recover my HDD and only managed to get about 20% of the random spots of the drive before it started screaming for death. I have a few service disks myself for that aforementioned 320 that I still need to image, need to find my rig that does that from the move...

Click to expand...

I don't but I can probably create some with instructions...

The only ones I've seen so far are:
Diagnostic Diskette Creation Service Aid
This selection provides a tool for creating a set of customized
diagnostic diskettes for this system.
#########################################################

CREATE DIAGNOSTIC DISKETTE SERVICE AID 802120

Choose the diskette that you want to create.

Create diagnostic diskette number 1A
Create diagnostic diskette number 2
Create diagnostic diskette number 3A
Create diagnostic diskette number 3B
Create diagnostic diskette number 3C
Create diagnostic diskette number 4
Create diagnostic diskette number 5
Create diagnostic diskette number 6A
Create diagnostic diskette number 6B
Create diagnostic diskette number 7A
Create diagnostic diskette number 7B
Create diagnostic diskette number 8
Create diagnostic diskette number 9


######

Are these the ones you're after?

I was told that there is microcode on the HDD that needs to be loaded for the machine to do anything (though that may be for the earlier machines like the 320 can't remember)

Click to expand...

I'm not sure on this, I can look around on the disk if you have anymore info filename wise.

For what its worth, in my playing about, I installed a fresh disk, and loaded Aix 4.3 Base OS on it without any troubles...

Jonathan

Noted, thank you,
I heard about the microcode in passing, so I may be mistaken especially if you have yours booted to AIX without any such things. It could be something I am mixing up from the much older units like the 320 and 320H

My 1A has a bad sector, and my set doesn't have a 3C or a 7B, maybe we have different versions of the diagnostics? Mine is the 7012/360 so it's slightly older than yours after all.

I have the following disks that I have imaged from my own personal collection. I plan on uploading the disks somewhere soon, probably internet archive.

RSBOOT1A.DSK - DIAGNOSTIC BOOT - >16MB SYSTEM -
1 BAD SECTOR AT 77,2,12 MOST LIKELY NOT AN ISSUE, UNTESTED

RSBOOT1B.DSK - DIAGNOSTIC BOOT - ~8MB SYSTEM
RSBOOTT2.DSK - CONFIGURATION
RSBOOT3A.DSK - GRAPHICS - POWERgraphics GT0, GT1, COLOR, MONO
RSBOOT3B.DSK - GRAPHICS - POWERgraphics GT3, GT4
RSBOOT4.DSK - CONSOLE DEFINITIONS
RSBOOT5.DSK - MEDIA - DISK, TAPE, DISKETTE, CD-ROM TESTS
RSBOOT6A.DSK - COMMUNICATIONS - TOKEN RING, ETHERNET, 4-PORT MULTI, X.25
RSBOOT6B.DSK - COMMUNICATIONS - 3270, SERIAL OPTIC CHANNEL CONVERTER, 5080
RSBOOT7.DSK - ASYNCHRONOUS DEVICE - SERIAL, PARALLEL KEYBOARD, MOUSE, HIDs
RSBOOT8.DSK - SERVICE AIDS
RSBOOT9.DSK - MULTIMEDIA - AUDIO AND VIDEO CAPTURE DEVICES
RSDIAGHM.DSK - DIAGNOSTIC TEST HIGH CAPACITY 2MB
7207DIA1.DSK - MODEL 7207 DIAGNOSTICS VER 2.1 DISK 1 OF 2
7207DIA2.DSK - MODEL 7207 DIAGNOSTICS VER 2.1 DISK 2 OF 2
GPUuCOD1.DSK - GPU MICROCODE HIGH PERFORMANCE 8-24BIT 3-D COLOR GPU MODULE DISK

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BAD DISKS

RSDIAGLM.DSK - DIAGNOSTICS TEST LOW CAPACITY 1MB - MULTIPLE BAD SECTORS NEED TO
GET FLUX READ OF DISK
STOP7012.DSK - SYSTEM TOPOLOGY DISK?? - MULTIPLE BAD SECTORS NEED TO GET FLUX
READ OF DISK

Click to expand...

I have uploaded my set to the internet archive. There may be errors any they haven't been fully tested in a working system, but hopefully this can help someone somehow down the line

KD2IXL said:

Noted, thank you,
I heard about the microcode in passing, so I may be mistaken especially if you have yours booted to AIX without any such things. It could be something I am mixing up from the much older units like the 320 and 320H

My 1A has a bad sector, and my set doesn't have a 3C or a 7B, maybe we have different versions of the diagnostics? Mine is the 7012/360 so it's slightly older than yours after all.

I have the following disks that I have imaged from my own personal collection. I plan on uploading the disks somewhere soon, probably internet archive.

Click to expand...

I've yet to actually create one the disks, with the floppy drive issues at hand, and I ran into insufficient space on a 1.44m formatted disk when using a drive from another machine. I suspect these need to be on 1.78m formatted maybe.

Do you know anyway to capture the disks images as the OS prepares them before writing them to disk? That would sure be easier to capture and upload. I recall seeing something about writing to /tmp/dsktimage or something, maybe I can nab that.

Be good to include AIX version the disks are made from too perhaps...

Will try and have a crack at it

Jonathan

jc179 said:

I've yet to actually create one the disks, with the floppy drive issues at hand, and I ran into insufficient space on a 1.44m formatted disk when using a drive from another machine. I suspect these need to be on 1.78m formatted maybe.

Click to expand...

I am not familiar with that format

jc179 said:

Do you know anyway to capture the disks images as the OS prepares them before writing them to disk? That would sure be easier to capture and upload. I recall seeing something about writing to /tmp/dsktimage or something, maybe I can nab that.

Click to expand...

I know many people are using something called a greaseweasle for odd formats though and are having success. Neat little device that connects to a modern PC over USB.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to get mine work, but I think its an error between the chair and keyboard.

jc179 said:

Be good to include AIX version the disks are made from too perhaps...

Click to expand...

I am not sure which version of AIX mine came from. They are factory labeled by IBM for the 7012 line of RS6000s. I didn't personally make them.

the diagnostic disks are standard pc style format. double sided, 18x 512b, 500k data rate (1440kb). if you ran out of space you were not writing them correctly. you don't need a flux imager for this project.