IBM Power PC

[terrywashington]

I found an old IBM Power PC 7248 Model#132 buried in a storage area. I am assuming this is an AIX box as I found an AIX OS CD containing version 4.3.2 in the drive. We are a mostly Sun shop and I am interested in learning about AIX. The hard drive seems to be toast as it spins-up then begins clicking. The IBM splash sceeen comes up and appears to prompt for a floppy disk. Has anyone heard of this model? Would it be worth resurrecting to use as a learning tool? Can anyone point me to documentation on this unit? Where would be a good place to get a replacement disk? It will probabaly need more RAM too as it only has 32MB inside.

 

[gwichman]

do a search on ebay for "rs6000". there are plenty of 43P's for sale and can usualyl be had for a bit over $200.. If you can find a 200mhz or even better, 333mhz 43P with some ram and disks for that price, thats probably your best bet. If you buy RAM and a disk for the one you already have, you could very well spend that much. But ebay is also a good place to look for RAM and disks and whatnot. Otherwise yes it's not a bad little play box for learning on. The RAM is troublesome though if indeed it only has 32MB. Though offhand i dont recall what 4.3.2's minimum RAM requirement is.

You could boot the box off the AIX CD and get into maintenance mode to run diag on the hard drive.. put the CD in, boot the box and when the icons are going across the bottom, hit 1,4,F4,F1.. it's one of those 4 but i always forget which exactly. once the icons finish filling the screen it should go into the bios menu where you can setup the boot devices. Put CDROM as #1, save, and exit. it should then boot off the CD.

 

[tkat]

I have become very aware of the 7248 and know a great deal about it. I also have a 43p-140/333, a 43p-240/233/233,
and a 43p-150. In addition, I have a 730 mca, a 590 mca, and a 5080 slave system. Personally, I think the 7248 is a
pretty decent machine, and I have found an upgrade to 200
mhz for $100. I am running AIX 3.2.1 and catia on 27gigs on
that machine, and I am very happy with it.