Mastodawn

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

Scope update: one had a spinning HD but no BIOS boot screen and lots of beeps, the other has boot screen but no HD.

Trying to extract the HD, but the Agilent design dumbasses made it so that you need to disassemble pretty much the whole scope just to extract the HD…
It’s an IBM TravelStar, close cousin to the IBM DeathStar and just as prone to catastrophic failure…

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

Most of the effort is because of this %%**^% screw.
I’ll admit: Agilent tried hard to shield the HD from vibrations… It is mounted on a holding plate with rubber spacers.

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

HD liberation!
I’m 99% sure the drive is dead, but hoping for that 1%, so let’s connect to a IDE to USB adapter.

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

IT'S ALIVE!!!

Full HD copy went smooth without any audible attempts to retry and no errors reported.
I also checked if there was any proprietary data left from the previous owner, but no. 🙂
Next step: trying to make this things boot. Replace bios battery. Connect VGA monitors. Anything to get some amount of life out of it beyond ominous beeps and a black screen...

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

Long beeps. No BIOS screen. Only RAM and alternate VGA card plugged in, but even with those unplugged it behaves the same. CPU fault?
I could try swapping the motherboard of the other scope…

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

How do you remove the fan/heatsink of a CPU?

@tom_verbeure If it's glued on, try putting it in a freezer. That makes the glue brittle and with a bit of careful twisting, you might snap it off. Careful though, don't blame me if you cracked the die!

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

@G33KatWork There’s a metal clip, almost identical as on my R&S AMIQ.
Except that unlike the AMIQ, there is no obvious to push somewhere to release the clip.

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

@G33KatWork Better view of the metal clip.

@tom_verbeure Ah, I didn't see that. Then, no idea.
Very carefully pull it down. Not sure how old you are, but during Athlon XP times these were common. The clip usually had some place to put a screwdriver into to push it down. If that's not there, then I have no idea.

penguin42 5d ago

@G33KatWork @tom_verbeure Yeh I agree it's probably just pressure on that clip; I remember finding one where the tab had broken off one year in the office after it cooled down over the xmas hols!.
I noticed it said 'thermaltake' on the top; a bit of searching I reckon that's a 'Thermaltake Golden orb':
https://www.electromyne.de/public/catalog_xmlxslproducts.aspx?art=viewproduct&suid=11565&productid=1028313753&zid=210bd6ab-f876-4795-91f7-6b11a146206f&ln=gb

Thermaltake Golden Orb Mini Socket A 462 370 AMD Intel CPU 3Pin Heat-Sink Kühler

Neue und gebrauchte Computer- und Server-Hardware wie Mainboards, Arbeitsspeicher (RAMs), Prozessoren (CPUs), Netzteile, Festplatten (HDDs), Laufwerke, Grafikkarten & elektronische Bauteile.

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

@penguin42 @G33KatWork Awesome! A Google on that led to this:

https://www.frostytech.com/articles/256/index.html

You need to rotate the cooler to fasten it. It’s removed now!

But first I’ll still look up POST codes…

penguin42 5d ago

@tom_verbeure @G33KatWork Oh wacky, I've not seen the rotation thing before!

Chris Petrilli 5d ago

@tom_verbeure it sure looks like you just need to push the metal tab out past the plastic “pin”. It seems designed really to be a one way thing mostly. Trivial to install with no extra features but f- you if you want to take it off.

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

The BIOS screen is up!

All it took was remove the CPU from the socket… and put it back.

This is with a generic VGA card and HD disconnected. I can now start to put the removed components back.

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

The money shot: the scope is working fine. 600 MHz/4 Gsps.

Not bad for a day of playing around. 4 Gsps works fine, but only when 1 channel is enabled, it drops down to 2 Gsps when you switch on another channel.

I need to figure out how to upgrade it from 600 MHz to 1 GHz. It’s supposed to be only a resistor fix. And there’s a second identical scope waiting too. $200 well spent.

Chris Petrilli 5d ago

@tom_verbeure it's not one of those 1/3 and 2/4 share A/D? So you can use 1/3 or 2/4 at full speed, but not 1/2?

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

@petrillic I'm not sure. Haven't gotten around checking out the official specs.

John Honniball 5d ago

@tom_verbeure Yay! Do you have the floppy disks for it? And a drive to read them with on a modern PC?

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

@anachrocomputer I have a USB floppy drive and floppy disks, but I've never been able to reliably make that works with any of my boat anchors. I think the head of those floppy drives are all far gone.
I don't really need it away: for printouts I use the unsurpassed "Fake Parallel Printer" dongle and for extract data, there's GPIB or Ethernet, and on thise maybe a USB flash drive if I can find Win98 drivers for it.

Gary @N8DMT 5d ago

@tom_verbeure Nice! You’ll probably spend more time cleaning it than fixing it!

Craig Bishop 5d ago

@tom_verbeure It’s amazing that drive was ok! Definitely makes the restoration more fun than tracking down hard to find software

Tom Verbeure 5d ago

@craigjb Yes, it’s not supposed to be this easy. :-)
I hope that I can reuse the same dive image on the second scope, but some of the HW might be different and the second one is a later version.

Onno (VK6FLAB)5d ago

@tom_verbeure rather than dismantling this further, I'd try to discover what the beeps mean. Likely they're POST beeps. (Power On Self Test)

In my experience, CPUs rarely fail after the first month. It's not unheard of, but I've never seen it in 40+ years as an IT professional.