I figured it couldn't hurt to drop in to HARD OFF on my walk back from the mall.

Posted 2025-06-16 | Back to blog index

I figured it couldn't hurt to drop in to HARD OFF on my walk back from the mall.

Wandering through the Junk PC aisle, a double-take, what is that teal beauty on the bottom shelf?

A SiliconGraphics O2? In MY rural Japanese city? How did that get here? The tag showed it had been there for over a week. At $60 I had to give it a home!

Lugging it home in the 31+C heat, squeezing in on the tram and dashing through the rain was a slog but it made it home!

Shelves of old PCs of dubious value.In the middle is a SiliconGraphics O2 A SiliconGraphics O2 in a thin HARD OFF plastic bag stood next to tram tracks with some smattering of rain on it

It looks to be in somewhat decent condition! The optical drive cover is loose, there's sticker reside and some scratches on the side.

Front of a SGI O2, with a round teal appearance, cool 3D logo and an optical drive bay cover that is taped on with yellowing tape Side of a SGI O2 revealing analog video and audio ports Rear of SGI O2 showing SCSI, VGA, etc ports. Bottom of SGI O2 showing Model No.: CMNB014ANT200 and Made In USA

It's super modular and the bits just slide out! It's a bit scary to when it requires a bit of force on these old plastics...

The SCSI HDD and Optical drive are missing (should be easy to replace), but most importantly, it is populated with CPU and RAM!

The rear of the SGI O2, now with empty cavities where the various ports were Four internal components laid out on the floor - logic board, drive tray, video card, PSU Close up of the logic board Close up of the RAM . Out of 8 slots, 4 are populated.

The label at HARD OFF said the LED turned on when powered on, but I was getting zero life. No LED, no fanspin.

First look at the PSU... Well that's a problem.

It was easy enough to unscrew the PSU and re-seat the pin connector. It didn't fix the problem.

When I had the PSU open I also beeped out this fuse which was fine.

PSU pin connector but half has caved in. Close up of a line voltage fuse inside a power supply

Doing a quick web search, it seems a common fix is to set this jumper on the logic board.

This did nothing either...

Closeup of the logic board. Under the Dallas clock chip is a jumper marked PWR

Hi, my name is David

A paper clip being held up menacingly in front of a printout of the power supply pin out.

Jumpering the power on pin on the power supply resulted in no life, no voltages. So I guess the power supply is dead!

update: Also no voltage on the 3.3V standby power pin

Power supply with a paper clip in two of the pins and a multimeter measuring two other pins

So... Anyone out there have any hot tips on debugging a dead SiliconGraphics power supply??

Back to blog index