smart, sgi, smart

Tuesday, July 13, 2004, at 06:29AM

By Eric Richardson

I mentioned last month that I had picked up an Indigo while up in the Bay area. Sunday night a 13W3 SGI monitor out here, so all the pieces were in place to give it a shot at booting up. I thought I was going to have to find an old, big external SCSI cable, but then last night I realized I had one under my bed, so that wasn't really an issue. What is an issue, though, is this error:

Initializing tod clock
setting secs=0 min=0 hour=0 day=1 month=1 year=0
Can't set tod clock

And repeat, ad infinitum.

Apparently if the clock battery on the Indigo motherboard goes dead, it won't boot at all. This flies in the face of logic and even of other SGI behaviour (my Personal IRIS has had a dead clock battery since I got it. On boot it sets the clock to the latest file timestamp on the drive). I think the box is an R4K, which means the battery's soldered onto the mobo. This guy says it's an easy connection, so I'll have to break out the soldering iron and see what happens.