Products > Test Equipment
Agilent MSOX4054A repair (NAND corruption issue)
jake111:
For what it's worth, I had DSO-X3054A with the same problem. Mine has recurring NAND corruption issue even after I fixed it, I have corrupt NAND blocks being reloaded on almost every startup (visible in the serial console). Originally I was on 2.35 firmware which bricks when corrupt, it would become corrupt after being off for only a few minutes.
It was stuck at the infinitely looping lights on the front panel even after using bootp command to load nk.bin from my computer and then using the NAND WRITE to write it to the NAND (this could also be accomplished by using ymodem transfer thru serial but MUCH slower). I suddenly realized that this message about failing to program the FPGA was important... So after programming NAND (which I had to do every few boots because it would become corrupt again) I then transferred FPGA3000A.bin (for 3000 series) into memory and programmed the FPGA with it, then without rebooting, booted with the boot command. Viola! My machine then proceeded to boot from my 2.35 USB boot disk, and I then hastily upgraded it to 2.50.
Now it boots reliably but on almost every boot it notes corrupt NAND blocks and rewrites them. I think my NAND is not long for this world, but thought I would mention this trick in case someone else gets stuck at the infinitely looping lights and can't figure out why. It seems that the FPGA has to be programmed in order for the infiniivision launcher to proceed far enough to get the machine to boot from USB. I assume that the FPGA data must normally be stored in NAND and this is why mine lost it. NAND alzheimers is a terrible thing.
EE-digger:
Thanks for that valuable lesson !
I wonder if we should have a sticky area which mirrors/archives all things related to the "resurrection" of DSOX, MSOX models.
jake111:
From what I have learned I think it is possible to resurrect even if the flash is inadvertently corrupted or erased. You just need to know appropriate memory locations and then use hardware level interface to get it in there. It appears that you need only the boot loader (p500?) to regain console and network access if this is broken, and from there you can load the appropriate OS binary and boot far enough to revive it from USB. I found a lot of conflicting information in the 2000/3000 series thread about how to actually construct a USB boot disk, there seem to be many methods and formats for the .lnk file but I believe only one of them is correct and others simply work because of intact OS images on the machine. I know there are variances between firmware versions but based on my experience you should only be using the latest or later firmwares which can recover from these known NAND issues.
Fortunately it sounds like Keysight has acknowledged the NAND flaw and are repairing it but I assume that sooner or later this will not be the case as all products fall out of support at a certain point. At this point the information on how to recover these scopes will be very important!
TheSteve:
If the flash is fully erased you will lose factory data - cal data, serial #, licenses etc.
jake111:
--- Quote from: TheSteve on February 09, 2020, 04:57:30 am ---If the flash is fully erased you will lose factory data - cal data, serial #, licenses etc.
--- End quote ---
I'm confused on mine because it suffered the NAND issue yet the serial, model number and "license model number" are gone. Do you know if anyone has successfully rewritten these? I found the DLL with SCPI commands in nk.bin but its obfuscated and it looks like I'm going to have to walk the code to try and get strings out of it... Argh
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