nearly a year after the last posts (including mine) I am finally in the hot phase of my ZVCE's repair. The "preliminaries" which cost me a lot of time were repairing the power supply, which was not only faulty, but literally destroyed. It consists of a main board and 3 subassemblies, and each of them had a fault - independent from each other. The only explanation is that it was sitting in a repair shop, used as a source of spares. The broken parts went back into the case.
Now the unit is booting from a CF, DOS and RTOS are coming up, then it reports "booting Transputers" and hangs. It writes log files onto the hard disk (i.e. the CF), confirming that there is a problem with transputer(s) - timing out. Unfortunately, no more information. Possible causes are, according to the service manual, software, the CPU board, the graphics board and the Measurement Control Unit or MCU board. These are the only ones that have transputers on them.
I swapped the CPU and Graphics with boards from a FSEK spectrum analyzer, which are identical. Same behaviour. I also tried 3 different CF's, to no avail. Btw., it seems to be not too picky about CF cards, from Transcend CF170 to consumer grade Sandisk Extreme and Ultra everything behaves the same.
There is a R&S utility called GR_CHECK.EXE which checks the links to the various transputers one by one and reports it's findings. I need it urgently, so if anyone on the board has it sitting around on his hard drive...
Regards
ghieber