I have a Tek TLA 715. It's worked flawlessly for several years and is still on Windows 2K as I see no reason to upgrade.
Recently I turned it on, it started to boot, the W2K splash screen came up and the progress bar worked its way all the way to the right hand end, as usual.
At that point the machine died.Only cycling mains power would restart,and with the same result.
Booting into safe mode, then running diagnostics sorta worked, but only in VGA (640 x 480 x 16 colours) The TLA app sorta worked too, but it's unusable in that video mode.
Everythng that follows was aimed at the 800 x 600 LCD native screen.
Next I dug out an old Ubuntu Karmic Koala CD and installed it on a new HDD. It installed and booted perfectly, and went into 800x 600 mode. 64K colours. It had to be an old and obsolete Ubuntu version because the optical drive is only a CD. Besides, Karmic Koala is about contemporary with the TLA., 32 bit etc etc.
I tried to install XP, but it proved difficult as the installer lost the CD on first boot. Googling told me that was a common problem, so I abandoned that idea.
Stripped machine, cleaned off 10 years dust and grime, reseated connectors, all that stuff. No change.
There is one (possible) clue, The Ubuntu video driver cannot see the external monitors. The TLA has the option of using two, to get max resolution. They used to work. I'm not sure how. The TLA uses the intel 815E chipset which supposedly supports both LCD and standard VGA interfaces. I think both at once, though it may need some extra RAM. Usually the Intel graphics, which is like Intel 740 uses a shared memory GART setup. There is a Lynx chip on the Radisys custom motherboard, which is unlike any motherboard I have seen. Not any familiar form factor. I don't know what the Lynx chip does. It is certainly something to do with graphics. So possibly W2K dies when it searches for external monitors. That's a wild guess, but Linux is usually a much more fault tolerant OS than any MS product.
Finally I ran memtest overnight, no errors at all.
This is really frustrating. My TLA is currently a $2000 Ubuntu Karmic Koala box. As the Tek software must have Windows of some kind, the box is effectively useless. Bummer! Why do these things happen at the most critical times?
Any one got any clues? Perhaps I should persue installing XP. I would be happy without external monitors. These were a great unit. A bit slow nowadays, but still workable and usable.
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