I'll begin by stating that I know next to nothing about the RS/6000 nor AIX.

We have two RS/6000 F50's at work, just kind of sitting around, which is sad. I decided a long time ago to mess around with them and Linux, which I ended up rendering both useless.

Now, someone may be interesting in buying them from us. Corporate policy demands that the drives be erased before they are sold. This means that I have to bring them and work some magic.

The farthest I have gotten is getting an AIX 4.3.2 system installed on them from the CD. This leaves me with a grey and green console and prompt and I'm stumped from here. So, here come the questions.

1. All the install documentation I've read just kind of jump from installing the system to some graphical login. I don't get this. I'm always dumped to a console login at the end. I've attempted through smit to configure the card and tried manual launching X, which says that the card isn't configured. It's a Matrox GXT130P. This is not an "on board" card like the other system, but neither seem to show a gaphical display. What am I doing wrong?

2. These machines have RAID controllers on them, but that's about all I know about them. Flipping around the Internet, I've seen much mention of "SSA", and have also noticed this in the install, but I don't know how to access this. What do I need to do?

I'm very familiar with linux, so the UNIX thing doesn't bother me. I just don't understand this machine and how AIX sets things up. Any help is greatly appreciated.

To add some more about the graphics card:

Logged in as root, if I type "X", I get

I then did this, but running the command off of the 3 CDs I have, I still have the following errored packages:

The ssa one probably points to my RAID controller problem, but I thought the rest might help out as well.

OK, first, if you want to have the graphics working, you should login to your green screen, put the first AIX CD and install the X11 environment, it's named something like X11.dt.rte.
First do that if you feel more comfortable with a graphical screen.
The second thing, concerning the "devices.ssa" thing :
put the first AIX CD-ROM in the CD reader.
Then type
smitty devices
choose install devices after IPL
then choose install from CD-ROM.
This should install the ssa drivers if they are on the AIX CD-ROMS.
Unfortunately, I don't remember on each CD-ROM are the device drivers : on the basic AIX CD-ROMS, or on a special CD-ROM, or on a floppy disk.... So you could have to repeat this from each media you own...
I think after that, from the "erased disks" point of view, you finished your job...

Ok, so through many different processes, I have jus tabout everything from the CDs install the RS/6000. I also went through each CD in the Setup After IPL section, which yielded the same errors. So that means no SSA so far...

BUT...

I found out that I need a special driver for the Matrox GXT130P, as per this document (http://www-opensup.bull.com/doc/srb/86A270EE04.pdf). I claims I need a separate CD with the devices.pci.2b102005 driver on it. This I do not have. If anyone has this, I can't image it would be against a license to help me out with this one, but then again, I could be wrong.

What this prompted me to do was throw all of stuff into the RS/6000 box, which means I now have a dual 332Mhz system with 1Gb of RAM. It has a different video card, and I am waiting for the install to finish so I can figure out what card this is. This may fix all my problems in the end, but I doubt it. These two boxes were spec'd out identically, except for the fact that they were purchased about 4 years apart.

More news when it comes in and thanks for the help so far.

Do you have the "enchancements" and/or the "add-ons" CD's ?

Okay...

I moved all of the hardware over and did the install. Everything seems to be working. The graphics card works, since its a Matrox GXT120P and is supported by default.

I'm having problems with the SSA RAID now. I took out all of the drives and put in a group of drives that I want to wipe out. The adapter is detected in SMIT, but thats about it. When I try to add physical drives in SMIT, I click the list of address it could be connected to, and it just says "There are no items of this type."

Does anyone have any info on how to setup the SSA RAID stuff. I'm used to good old Dell arrays where you hop in a BIOS, select the drives, tell it RAID-5 and kaflooey, you have RAID.

As for CDs, the only ones I have are the 3 install discs.

No, don't put the drives out.
The drives are flagged as belonging to a RAID group, and if you remove them you will not be able to put them in another disk cabinet.
And the disk cabinet knows the drives he is owning, and will refuse other drives.
As far as I remember, there is smit menu, something like "devices", "ssa devices", "crate a SSA RAID group", etc...

Here is where I'm at. I have a group of disks plugged in with the spacer drive slides in there so that all of the connectors on the backplane are occupied. I also have the loopback cables connected on the back of the SSA card. A1 -> A2 and B1 -> B2. The drives have lights on, so I know they are least moving in some capacity.

I entered SMIT and did the following:

Devices->SSA Adapaters -> List all SSA Adapters, which returned the following:
"ssa0 Available 10-68 IBM SSA Enhanced RAID Adapter (14104500)"

Devices->SSA RAID Arrays -> Add an SSA RAID Array
Selected the ssa0 device
Selected raid_5 as that was my only choice
I now have the option of listing the "Member Disks", which results in a dialog box with the following two lines:

"# Disks in Loop A are:"
"# Disks in Loop B are:"

This leads me to believe that there are no disks defined, so...

Devices->SSA Disks->SSA Physical Disks
Selected "Add an SSA Physical Disk"
Multiple types show up, from 1GB drives to 9 GB drives as others just labelled other. Choosing any of these and then listing the "CONNECTION address" yields:

"1800-051" There are not items of this type

Any clue on what I might have wrong here?

Nope ! you don't have to configure the SSA disks manually. The SSA physical discs have to be discovered automatically. Unfortunately, if AIX is not able to discover them, you will not be able to define them manually, the drivers will answer "device not found".
Something is physically wrong, probably the double-loop is not correctly configured, or one cable is missing. Don't you happen to have a blinking light on one of the drives or on the SSA adapter ?

Hey, thanks, that was it! I didn't notice the one blinking drive near the bottom. I have the array up and formatting right now. Thank you very much for all of your help.

Hurray ! I may proudly claim that I was able to help somebody today !