I've found, why my efforts on getting Windows XP on 54810 were doomed to failure...
... in this very thread ...
Before anyone starts talking WinXP on the 54810A series.
The 54830/31/32A/D used 1GHz or 1.2 GHZ Pentium III processors on a newer platform without ISA slots. They did use the same C&T graphics driver chip, though. However, the ACQ controller is newer (In fact the older ACQ controller from the 54810A series is present but only used for power on functions, front panel control, and the scope's video frame buffer) I think upgrading to XP would be a problem as the driver for the ACQ controller would not want to talk to the old ACQ board.
EDIT: And I don't think the pin-out for the ribbon cable is the same anyway...
EDIT2: which wouldn't matter anyway. Duh. You'd have to find an XP driver for the OLD controller.
The picture shows the newer ACQ controller in red, the old one in blue
If one could find a newer motherboard (just to upgrade the hardware for performance) with an ISA slot (For GPIB functionality) it just might work.
According to the post cited above, Tombstone board (old
acq board interface card that is in 54810) was delegated to handling I/O and C&T graphics in XP based scopes (5483x)
(edit: according to service manual, I/O was connected to new board, old board was connected to display only - and nothing else - which makes no sense to me whatsoever, from what it got data to display? from Windows scope app!?). Scope was connected to another board.
So its no surprise that Windows XP tstone.sys is not enough for running XP on 5481x/2x/35/4x...
No surprise that opening \\.\Scope0 failed... On the other hand opening \\.\Tombstone0 failed as well... (I think that I've tried it at least once, but now I'm not sure).
I don't know how could I've missed that post on the first page. I guess I never enlarged that thumbnail, as I don't remember this image.
Prior to this latest ehm... discovery, I've got an impression, that there were two distinct
ACQ boards interface cards used in 54830/1/2/3 scopes - the original one that was carried over from 5481x/2x/35/4x, present in Win'98 based 54830/1/2/3 and newer one present in XP-based 54830/1/2/3. According to my impression, factory XP image in 54830/1/2/3 had only drivers for newer
acq board interface card, while mythical XP upgrade kit that fetches insane amounts of money on ebay® (N5383A Infiniium Performance Upgrade kit) provides drivers for older
acq board interface card as well.
My impression formed while reading
the other thread and other posts on the topic. I cannot find it right now, but somebody tried to force drivers for newer
acq board interface card (VEN_15BC&DEV_050X) to the old one (VEN_103C&DEV_1020 - he had big question mark in Device Manager for that card) and had some error message from the scope software (wrong address? invalid address? don't remember).
Maybe my impressions were all wrong and all 54830/1/2/3 Infiniiums in fact have two cards, as quoted post says - old tombstone board carried over from first generation of Infiniiums, now delegated to handle I/O and display
(edit: according to service manual, I/O was connected to new board, old board was connected to display only - and nothing else - which makes no sense to me whatsoever, from what it got data to display? from Windows scope app!?), and new
ACQ board interface card that interfaces mobo with the scope. This makes perfect sense for me.
Or maybe I mistook ACQ board (that big thing underneath) for interface card - and there were indeed two revisions of ACQ board installed in different revisions of the scope.
Somewhat supporting the hypothesis about two
ACQ boards interface cards in 54830/1/2/3 is the fact, that XP-based 54831D had tstone.sys/tstone.inf as well, as evidenced by
this post. I think that mythical XP upgrade kit that fetches insane amounts of money on ebay® (N5383A Infiniium Performance Upgrade kit) is the same as recovery media for all 54830/1/2/3 scopes, used internally by HPAK. The ISO's that once were hosted on Keysight's ftp, are possibly the exact same thing (except for the fact, that XP was upgraded to SP2 here).