Agilent 54831D modernising

[bostonman]

Not sure I understand or whether that helped.

If a computer generates a confirmation ID based on whichever methods including hardware, say the number is 12345 to make it simple.

When I call Microsoft, they don't know anything about my computer other than the number is 12345 and they need to provide a activation code based on this number.

If their activation code is 6789, then this program should also provide the same number. At least this is how I am thinking about it.

[coromonadalix]

anything else beyond that is indeed  un-helpful, we are drifting   .......

Now the scope works and Xp is working  ... the thread title seems fullfilled   ... 

[bostonman]

What about someone in the future who installs the image onto their scope and Microsoft is no longer supporting XP activation?

[bostonman]

Of course, it will be different due to other hardware set in the laptop. Everything is correct.

Just an FYI, I tried running the activation generator on another XP system, and, as expected, got the same number.

[SilverSolder]

What about someone in the future who installs the image onto their scope and Microsoft is no longer supporting XP activation?

There are workarounds to activating old software like XP.

[bostonman]

Yes... as it's been discussed.

I'm just trying to secure an understanding of making sure if/when Microsoft stops supporting XP registration and the possibility of me or anyone else needing to register XP for their scope, can do so.

So far I have the activation generator that so far has generated a different code than what my scope uses and a somewhat basic understanding that not connecting the scope to the Internet will allow me to use codes from online (but I haven't confirmed which methods work because it would require I reinstall XP on my scope from scratch which I'm not about to do).

[bostonman]

Just out of curiosity, does CTRL P work for you (to print the scope screen)?

It's listed in the drop down menu, however, for me, it doesn't work. No big deal as a simple mouse click isn't that troublesome, but odd it's listed in the drop down and doesn't work.

[Leho1986]

Love this type of threads. I too often get ancient stuff and go great lengths to modernize it (my most recent one was upgrading the insides of TLA704 to make it TLA715).

I think the biggest issue is this silly VGA overlay that requires ancient CT65550 graphic card tightly coupled to the OS, drivers and the scope app.

I wonder why Agilent designed this the way it is. I could see another possibility - to treat oscilloscope graticules / intensity grading output similarly to a camera video stream. Back in the days of these scopes it would be, for example, Bt848 PCI video grabber/tuner. Grabs a frame and sends over PCI to the app and then the app can display that onto Win32/DirectX/OpenGL surface. It has small overhead of buffer copies, but it is much simpler and the modernization with a PCIe to PCI adapter should be possible.

The MSO8104A glitch sounds promising, maybe it is worth pursuing further. I could imagine (just guessing, I don't have the scope) that providing a phony DLL (that the scope app tries to use) instead of the real driver might stop the crashes.
Hello.  i have 1 pc 54831d (main board intel 815) broken hdd. can you send me ghost file or driver and all necessary for me to reinstall new win xp os. thank you very much  much!

[Leho1986]

Folks

I've spent the past few weeks on and off investigating getting my old PC-based 54831D scope modernised to a Skylake processor, and although it's not yet a completed project, I thought I'd put some notes down as I've seen a handful of posts on the subject of updating these scopes. The aim is to have a reasonably current OS, and improve the scope's general performance, particularly when dealing with large memory acquisitions and doing decodes, which is my typical use case for this instrument. If there are any corrections or other constructive comments please feel free to add them.

Why? To be completely honest I've burned far too much time and resources on this project, I thought it'd be half a day or so. I'll now never see the RoI, but I've been like a dog with a bone on it, and I don't really need to do it: for day to day use there are better instruments at my disposal for most things, but occasionally the 54831D still earns its place on the bench. So it's because you can, not because you need to do it, a bit like climbing Everest.

If you're considering typing a response along the lines of "why would you do that?" I have the afore quoted pre-baked answers to save your typing effort 

Overview

Here is the Agilent 5483xx family:

Model   Bandwidth   Channels
54830D   600MHz   2+16
54831D   600MHz   4+16
54832D   1GHz      4+16
54833D   1GHz      2+16
54830B   600MHz   2
54831B   600MHz   4
54832B   1GHz      4
54833A   1GHz      2

These are all 4GSa/s scopes, which drops to 2GSa/s when using channels sharing the same ADC. For example in 4 channel scopes, using ch 1+2 or 3+4 will result in 2GSa/s maximum sampling rate on each channel, but using ch 1+3, 2+4, 2+3 or 2+4 gives you 4GSa/s on each channel. They max out at 128Mpts memory.

You can't update a 2ch scope to a 4ch scope or a DSO to and MSO as there are required front panel features that will be missing (sounds obvious, but to avoid any doubt I mention it here).

It's a Windows XP Pro PC-based scope from about 2002 or so, and ran until about 2005. It's woefully underpowered nowadays in terms of computing power, using an old 1GHz P3 with 512MB RAM and a PCI (not PCIe) motherboard, but the acquisition electronics remain solid, although devotees of high update rates and intensity graded displays will be largely disappointed. To display the waveforms quickly enough on this old hardware it uses the concept of VGA overlay, which hands over a rectangular section of the screen to hardware external to the graphics card. There were a number of similar scopes and even LAs from the era, and some of the really early ones were Windows 98 based with even less RAM.

The unit I have was based on the "latest" Motorola VP22 motherboard. This maxes out with the 1GHz P3 and 512MB RAM as far as I've been able to fathom in terms of my own testing and what I could find out from Googling.

The UI is limited on the front panel. You frequently need to use the Windows UI to access stuff, but not rarely the keyboard, so I keep a wireless USB mouse under the desk on an under-desk keyboard slide to do this: that way it doesn't take up bench space, and you don't even need to slide out the keyboard, you just operate it from under the desk.

First, the easy upgrades

Update to SSD, either PATA (if you can find one) or SATA with a SATA/PATA adapter (there are no SATA ports on the motherboard). Some really new SATA drives I couldn't get to boot. If you use a SATA/PATA adapter, keep in mind that the internal CD-ROM is configured as an IDE slave. While there are concerns about XP and TRIM, I've had no problems and am still using the same SSD from a couple of years ago without any problems.

The 600MHz scopes can be updated to 1GHz by removing a resistor on the acquisition board. https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/54831b-upgrade-to-54832b-possible/

There are a few other easy upgrades knocking around too if you do a bit of judicious Googling.

Tools of the trade

To backup, move and resize the disk I used Acronis True Image 2013 and 2016. If you choose to do the imaging on the scope itself, then be aware that the 640x480 screen becomes a limitation, there is a fix https://kb.acronis.com/content/3836 In general though, you'll find it quicker to backup and restore images using a more modern PC booted with Acronis TI with assorted USB 3.0 to SATA/PATA adapters if you have them available. I am sure there are other methods, this is what I used.

I also found I had to fix the restored disk's MBR a few times after imaging, for that I used Paragon Disk Manager. It appears that the Smart Boot Manager deployed with a virgin scope doesn't much like resizing partitions, and I don't know the password that Agilent used on it to configure it the password is "agilent" (lower case, no quotes), so I just blew away the MBR. The problem is then that if you need to get into the recovery partition, you have some work to do, but then you did keep the original disk, right? 

USB 2.0 PCI adapter. The VP22 Motherboard only supports USB 1.0 onboard. I used a SATA/USB 2.0 combo board that I had, but I couldn't boot a SATA drive from it on this board although the card's ROM was recognised at POST. I also tried a USB 3.0 PCI card (rare on PCI!) but there is limited point to this as the motherboard's maximum PCI bus is barely over 1Gbps. Also consider that the PCI bus is a shared resource, and some of this will be demanded by the scope app, so take care on what you place on this bus.

PCIe bootable SATA/PATA card - handy because Skylake motherboards only rarely support IDE booting.

SATA CD/DVD drive - Skylake only supports USB 3.0 out of the box, so your OS needs the drivers out of the box, default USB 2.0 drivers won't work on Skylake. You can slipstream them but I've had very limited success with this (on an X99 board with an i7-6800K!).

PCI to PCIe and PCIe to PCI riser adapters.

Upgrading the OS

Once, maybe 25-30 years ago, I considered that knew my way around a motherboard and PCs in general pretty well. Those were in the days when frankly there wasn't really much to know, arm yourself with a screwdriver and Bob's your uncle. As time has gone on, PC architecture has become layer upon layer of functionality, with some things being completely disposed of and becoming obsolete, while others have become so ingrained it's nigh on impossible to remove them, like a PS/2 port for example, essential if you can't even get a USB stack up, let alone bluetooth of course.

So much of this is me getting up to speed with today's PC tech, although I've been doing it on and off pretty much since the mid 80s when the PC was born.

I tried doing fresh installs of OS (Windows Vista and Windows 7), and although the OS installs worked, I couldn't get the scope app to work afterwards. There's some Sentinel service running, and I don't know how much that has to do with it, but it's generally for copy protection of one sort or another. There are also some other bits and pieces you need to find such as drivers, the IO libraries and the app itself.

So I chose to do in-place upgrades. To upgrade in place from XP to Windows 7 you need to do this via Vista. The only in-place upgrade sequence from XP Pro is XP Pro -> Vista Ultimate -> Windows 7 Ultimate. You can't go straight from XP Pro to W7.

I could get the existing OS to run on a Skylake H110 motherboard by using Acronis Universal Restore to add the XP SATA drivers to the build (driver here: http://www.win-raid.com/t11f23-Modded-Intel-AHCI-and-RAID-Drivers-digitally-signed.html using the 32 bit 11.2 version which covers Skylake). Often I also needed to do an XP repair (with media slipstreamed with the aforementioned drivers using nLite) to fix ACPI BSODs, and pressing F5 when the F6 prompt is offered, selecting the Pentium 4 ACPI later on. I sometimes found that the slipstreamed restored image needed activating, which is irritating to say the least as there's no network set up so it's a manual telephone process. To add insult to injury, the activation process itself is broken, and you need to do a manual install of IE8 in safe mode to work around it (go figure).

Unless you're a current hardcore PC engineer who makes slipstreamed OS bootable USB thumb drives in their sleep, I recommend installing from CD/DVD rather than trying to make up bootable USB drives which add to the general confusion although I accept in the longer term they'd be more convenient. For bootable USB drives for things like Paragon Disk Manager and Acronis, I used SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 thumb drives as they're super fast.

Upgrading from XP to Vista can be done on the scope's VP22 board, and this works although of course it's horrendously slow. One thing to note is that it won't upgrade complaining about .NET needing to be uninstalled but there no officially documented way seemed to succeed (way to go M$). In the end I simply renamed the C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell directory and re-ran the upgrade. The scope app itself is fine when running on the VP22 board under Vista. Upgrading to Window 7 though failed and rolled back each time I tried it on the board.

I had no luck doing an in-place Vista upgrade on a ported XP image on a Skylake board, it failed each time. Instead I restored the working VP22 Vista image and retrofitted the Skylake AHCI drivers using Acronis Universal Restore. I could then do a Windows 7 upgrade on the Skylake board.

I have had success with running the scope fully up to Vista on the VP22 board, and also a ported XP on a Skylake board. The ported XP suffered because it  lacked working drivers for things like USB (at least I've not been able to get them to work yet), and the ACPI mismatch means it won't properly turn off or reboot under software control.

Practical logistical problems

The IO shield on these scopes is milled or punched out of the chassis, it's not replaceable. So the choices are (a) find a compatible board [I failed], (b) hack a hole for an IO shield or (c) use assorted risers. If you're brave, then sure, go for (b). Considering this scope still has substantial resale value in its factory state, I preferred option (c). More on this later, I am sure.

I've tried other options such as mini ITX and DTX boards with PCIe to multiple PCI daughter boards in place of where the mATX board would present its cards. This hasn't been too successful, the daughter boards tended not to work or only worked very intermittently. I strongly suspect this is a power related problem, although they are supplied with their own molex or SATA power connector. At first the USB 3.0 male-male cables used to sent the PCIe data were the suspects, but now I'm not so sure.

The preferred method now is to go back to using individual PCI to PCIe adapter risers off the mATX board and fabricate a frame internally.

Drivers...

Regarding drivers, as well as the Agilent drivers, there are also the drivers for the CT65550 graphics card pair. There's only one PCI acquisition/GPIB interface board, but it requires about eight drivers. Most of the Agilent drivers are not properly exposed as the .inf files are missing from the deployed build. They can, however, be found on the scope's RECOVERY partition inside a ghost image. I opened this up inside an old VM with Ghost 9.0 installed and managed to find a bunch of .infs for all the devices. Here are the .infs & .sys I found with relevance:

A0014602.inf
Adobe.inf
Adobe.sys
agave.inf
agave.sys
agbridge.sys
agt357.inf
agt82341.sys
agt82350.sys
agt82357.sys
agtgpib.inf
faroacq.inf
Faroacq.sys
mesa.inf
Mesa.sys
Phramacq.inf
phramacq.sys
tstone.inf
tstone.sys
Zeum.inf
Zeum.sys

I located all of these and placed them in a single directory to ease later installation from the Device Manager applet.

The CT65550 graphics card driver is in c:\WinXPFiles\CT65550. I am still having trouble getting this to install properly and consistently on newer operating systems, it seems quite flakey when you override the default VGA driver.

Once you have all the above installed, you need to run the postsysprep.bat batch file in the C:\PciFilter directory. Hopefully when you reboot, all will work!

Interesting...

More recently, a couple of days ago I went full throttle and installed an in-place Windows 7 on a Skylake motherboard on top of a Vista that was suffering slow screen updating in the scope app, with maybe one screen graticule update per second or so. Of interest was that the updated screen graticule looked like it had intensity grading, something I've never seen on this scope (other than with the limited very slow persistence-based blue trace Megazoom option).

At this point I thought I'd take a punt and remove the CT65550 cards, and see what the on board Intel 530 graphics did with an external monitor, wondering how (or if) this works with the same software in later scopes like the 8000 series which don't use the VGA overlay technique, assuming that this was what was happening. Well, it seemed at first to work really well, screen updates were at least as good as before and there was definitely intensity grading now. I could also increase the resolution, with 1024x768 being the maximum that the application would show.

Then I took a look at what the scope thought it was with the Help->About. It seemed it now though it was an MSO8104A!

All this was short-lived though, because I tried the scope on equivalent time rather than real time using the built in calibrator, and the graticule was just gobbledegook. The app crashed soon afterwards too, so I strongly suspect in its attempt to be something it isn't it broke something. Reinstalling the old VP22 board in its virgin state restored everything to normality.

So the effort now is to try to get it back to thinking the Windows 7/Skylake combo is a 54831D/54832D with the CT65550 with the integrated flat panel.

Results so far

Running the ported XP image on a $60 Skylake micro ATX H110 board with the three PCI cards on individual PCIe->PCI risers, performed extraordinarily well with a G4500T 2C2T Pentium 3.0GHz/3MB cache 35W processor, however those risers mean that the boards won't fit upright in the chassis. For a short time I also tried a 2C2T G3900 Celeron 2.8GHz/2MB cache 51W processor and a 2C4T i3-6320 3.9GHz/4GB cache 51W processor. Boot times were pretty impressive, under 20s to get the scope screen up in the case of the i3, and not much further behind with the other two processors. This being a single-threaded app, the application start up times all very closely reflected the processor speed. The first time I started the scope app I assumed something must have failed because it came up so quickly!

There is a limit to the processor you can put in this scope without an additional power supply, this is why I went for the G4500T 35W processor which seemed a reasonable selection based on price and single thread performance for a 35W processor.

Tips for buying 5483xx scopes (for later further expansion I am sure)

• Make sure it has the VP22 motherboard, with Windows XP installed.
• Probes, in particular the digital probes for the MSO, are fairly rare eBay finds: they're not the same as those used on other lower end Agilent/Keysight MSOs.

Hello.  i have 1 pc 54831d (main board intel 815) broken hdd. can you send me ghost file or driver and all necessary for me to reinstall new win xp os. thank you very much  much!

[Azusa]

Today I try the "Howardlong" approach, I found that does not require the use of original motherboard and PCI interface card, can also get a "MSO8102A", although this type of Anilent has never been sold too.
I was on a 54833D for this experiment, the machine's hardware configuration for GA-P43-ES3G/E8500/4GB/INTEL 710 100GB/nVIDIA FX1800. After pulling out the original 65550 graphics card boot, the program can run normally (starting speed is much slower than the original), and automatically into the XGA resolution display.
I do not have a waveform update rate test (because I did not get the manual test), just a visual comparison with another 54833B, it is clear that "MSO8102A" is much higher. I hope Howardlong can share the test program, let me check the different video card waveform update rate.
Finally, this machine is refitted, lost the original deep storage options, but also because the motherboard replacement, the serial number has become garbled. Do not know who can share the deep crack type storage options way? Thank you in advance!

How did you make it MSO8102A？Which version did you use?I tried remove the 65550 card on my 54833 and it became no model.The version of i used is 5.71.

[Leho1986]

Hi everybody.  my hdd is broken . i need a ghost file or driver for main board 815 win xp sp3(54831d) . thank you very much !

[Shef]

good day friends! I bought an oscilloscope 54832b and installed new hardware in it, installed a display (800*600 precision). lga1155 B75M-GL motherboard, 4 GB memory and 128 GB ssd! installed everything, launched it - did a clean installation of Win xp 32, there were problems with installing the drivers, I had to pull the drivers out of the old children's disk, now everything is installed in hardware. But now there is a gap in the software, for some reason it does not launch infinion Agilent (it says that there is no file mclmcrt71.dll ). please tell me what am I doing wrong?

[Shef]

доброго времени суток друзья! я купил осциллограф 54832b и устануоил в него новое железо, посенял дислей (800*600 точнк). материнская плата lga1155 B75M-GL, память 4 Гб и ssd 128 Гб! все установил запустил - поставил чистую установку Win xp 32, были проблемы с установкой драйверов, пришлось вытащить драйвера из старого детского диска, теперь аппаратно все установлено Но пробела теперь в программной части, почему то не запускает infinion Agilent (пишет что нет файла mclmcrt71.dll). подскажите пожалуйста что я делаю не так ?

[ARF]

You are nakolhozil chtoto, a sovet sprashivaech u nas?
Ischi etot file na starom diske e kopiruy na noviy v System32. Understand?

[Shef]

collective farm is when everything is wired and nothing works! but there’s a problem with the software, so I’m trying to ask advice from gurus who have already redesigned it!

[Shef]

yes, I was looking for this file on the old disk, but strangely enough it’s not there

[Shef]

here are additional photos of what's inside

[Shef]

let's get everything in order! My channel on YouTube - https://youtu.be/uFP-nsLWnKs?si=vRIyC_RXH3WsaoGu thank you very much for your kind words! 1) I saw that the guys were reworking and installing other displays (1024*800), this seems to be no problem (I’ll send a photo a little later). 2. The power supply of the processor is connected to the 12 V bus, the voltage is still normal! There are no problems here, if something changes under load then an additional power supply will be installed. Now I can’t figure out the software....(

[Shef]

not quite so, the standard power supply for the processor is taken from there, where the power of the processor is 35 W! If you do not exceed the declared TDP, then everything will be fine, but if the consumption is higher, of course you will have to install an additional power supply! So far everything is working fine for me, but this is without downloading the program!

[ARF]

The internal power supply has:
+12V 5A
-12V 5A
+5V 35A
2x 3.3V 35A

VP22 or M815 MB don't use +12V for power consuming operations, they are using +5V and +3.3V.

Is still kolhoz.

[Shef]

In order not to unite, you need to measure the consumption of the ACQ board! power supply unit 12*5=60W! This is enough to check, when it works we’ll think about whether it’s worth fixing or not! I don't see a problem yet. I need to figure out the software!!! you don’t have an image for win xp32 on a board with lga1155???

[Bud]

The scope datasheet says the OS is Windows XP Pro. Make sure you install the correct Windows version.

[ARF]

It seems like, it should work without the stock videocard.
Write to this guy and ask about win7/win10 image https://www.eevblog.com/forum/profile/?u=486132

[coromonadalix]

@  ARF  its an english forum  stay in english please

rectify your previous threads pls

[Shef]

yes yes of course Windows Xp 32  professional