Fun, fun!
Well that was exciting -- I just finished resuscitating, an old SGI Octane. It's bad enough that we don't have support contracts on any of our SGI systems, an that most of them are old enough to belong in a museum (close to 10 years old).
This was an odd problem to begin with. The machine had been running fine until we upgraded the OS and tried to reboot it a few weeks ago. Then, it turned into a noisy doorstop. It doesn't seem like it was a problem with the upgrade, the diagnostics mumbled something about the front plane power supply, and gave us a bunch of part numbers.
Since we aren't going to spend any money on this thing ($200/hour for SGI support -- I don't think so!), I got to get a couple of old machines out of storage and cannibalize them for spare parts. Of course, I tried just moving the hard drive from machine to machine, but the only thing that did was prove that I had three dead machines -- each dead in different ways.
As far as I can tell, one of the machines from storage is completely dead. You turn it on, the fans run, but you never get any video signal and the power light doesn't even come on. It could be a power supply, could be the motherboard, who knows; I didn't care enough to find out. The other spare gave me memory errors, but mostly seemed to work. Of course, the original machine is a dual-cpu, and the spares are both singles -- just to add to the fun.
So, to make a longish story short -- I ended up being able to use the original chassis, the cpu board from the mostly working machine, and moved the CPUs and memory from the original system to the new CPU board. It's not brain surgery, but it's been a long time since I've dealt with the guts of an SGI (and now I remember why :) ). Not to mention the fact that all three of the boxes had 7-8 years of accumulated dust bunnies. My hands were filthy, I had dust bunnies the size of golf balls rolling across the floor, and left a really nasty spot on the carpet from the crud on the front of one of the machines.
Oh well, it's done, the machine works, and hopefully I can talk them into retiring it soon anyway. Now to go fix the external hard drive on another of the antiques.....