Tek CSA7404/TDS7000 repair project (Upgraded memory/CPU)

[coromonadalix]

yeah   i posted what ive found 

the "customized TEK driver" zip  seem to be a v 1.11 ??      very conflicting  1.11 1.12 ..   front panel 1 2  ....

i need to do some cleanup  loll  i have 2 or 3  main TDS 5 6 7 8 ...  series folders with maybe  lots of doubles, iso's, ghost  etc ....

Chips and Tech drivers where v2.50g  version  69000 series ...

the restores cd's   made with powerquest   if i recall can be opened,  and we can extract what they have inside, i was able in the past ....   

when i re-started the tds7404,   i did found an old usb2 hub and an old 2gb  usb key,  i was able to put lots of drivers in it, and try to install and see what works or not  loll    BEFORE putting  TEK Scope SW

power pc console serial port  was rock solid, the last console message ended up with an "running at xx ticks" / no log errors after many tribulations and help ....

[ezalys]

I don't think I'm really in need of a disk image. I don't think a disk image would be useful if the motherboard can't see either the hard drive or the cd-rom drive at all.

[coromonadalix]

you have some mobos still available in the 440  or 810 chipsets

alas they are kinda costly

if i had your scope i would have tried to restart it ... to help you, unless you have  other scope related problems like  power  etc ...

it is hard sometimes see everything from afar

i would try  to flash your bios with non tek ones   is the floppy working ?  you talk about ide ports not working

but you have usb and floppy ...   

[hazelnutsky]

First question: Does the BIOS see the HDD and/or CDROM and/or FDD when you press F2 at power up and enter the BIOS Setup?

Second Question: Can you boot from a Win98 floppy and run FDISK to see the partition info on the HDD ?

Its not so easy to boot from a W2K or W7 diskette, as you need four of them, and finding FDISK is tricky.

[coromonadalix]

you have sites with  boot disk from 95 era and up  https://www.bootdisk.com/,   just find an 98se ram drive or no ram drive, 

you will need  diskimage win32

if the bios ide settings say are off,  even drives on ide flat cables will not be seen,  its like powering off the ide interface, you do have the master slave configs thru a jumper on the hdd itself, i normally put "cable select" mode  or "master"  for the hdd

Fdisk  will not see the drive  if the bios does not identify it,  bios is the main factor here,  it manage the motherboard peripherals ...  corrupted bios = problems, crippled bios could means problems   etc ....

some boards will switch between sata and ide, or ask if you want sata to act like ide or some legacy mode  (sorry forget the proper naming)

you do have the sata or ahci  interface  mode  too  ...  always select non AHCI  this messes up things


1st:   try to find a clear cmos  and reset everything, and try to put some ide drives,  as i wrote   you could have brand and size problems, some can or could be seen, some not ... TEK crippled

flash an original bios  ... and re-try

still not working  =   the ide port could have been damaged, flat cable damaged, wron ide port for the hdd,   or in the end  the mobo needs to be changed

[charlyd]

check your boot params!

[feedback.loop]

This TDS7104 unit booted Windows, but the Tektronix scope software did not load due to a faulty Dallas DS1245YP-100 NVRAM chip. An FRAM-based replacement was built and installed. The lost configuration was restored. The scope is back in business, and will never need a new battery again (except one on the Intel motherboard, which is easy to replace).

[hazelnutsky]

An update on my Windows98 Quest. The Tektronix CD arrived finally from the USA. I was able to restore the OS from the CD - it boots, and writes over the partition table and set the disk to 37.2GB, fills the HDD and all done is 16 minutes! All the drivers are installed. I next installed 2.5.3 TekScope software, and finally copied across my Calcons [0-15] to the vXboot directory, and the scope is all up an running - total time 31 minutes!
It still annoyingly asks for a log-in password 1'04" into the boot, and by 1'47" there is a waveform displayed. All in all Win98 is far better than W2K.

[coromonadalix]

 you had old windows tools to enter the pw automatically, or you can remove the password request ...

glad it worked 

powered for 30mins, without any probes, you can start an spc test, will take maybe 20 minutes

[snoopy]

Hi folks,

My TDS7404 died after working great a few months ago. After having it unplugged for a few months, I went to turn it on and found that the x86 side of the machine appears to have a dead graphics adapter. I can't get into the BIOS setup and no amount of CMOS clearing will bring things back. It does appear to be functional enough to run MS-DOS headless, however, which I can verify by typing commands that make things beep (there's no serial console on the motherboard is there?). You can read a bit more in another thread [1].

I haven't been able to find any evidence of anyone bringing their scope back from this symptom, so my question here is: given that the PPC board seems healthy (boots up to "L" on the 8-segment display) and the power supply voltages check out according to the Service Manual, it seems like I should be able to swap out the BL440ZX with a Windows 7 upgrade kit from eBay [2], which includes a SF/SU810 motherboard and hopefully things should spring back to life (also I'll get a much faster (in terms of usability) scope out of it!), since the bad BIOS/Video Adapter lives on the x86 motherboard.

Am I correct in my assumptions? Is there anything else I should try?

This will get you up and running with the video set to PCI instead of AGP as it should be, even if the on-board graphics are bad. You will need to change the battery on the CPU board as it is likely dead.
It is a DOS boot floppy with a utility to restore the correct CMOS contents which I just made from a TDS7104 with the BL440ZX MB. When you hear three beeps, press F10 to continue booting. When the floppy access light goes out, the CMOS should be restored. Then press CTRL ALT DEL to warm boot the MB. You should then have the LCD display back.

Recently I got my TDS7054 out of storage after two years and sure enough it would not boot up to the scope anymore. Traced it down to a dead battery on the PC motherboard. After replacing the battery still no go even though the power PC board was going through the correct motions and the 7-seg display showed 'L' which meant it was waiting to the PC motherboard to do it stuff. Tried booting up on a floppy and using the cmos.exe program to reset the RAM ie (cmos -r NONET) . But no go. Then I made a floppy from Jwallings image (many thanks for this). For those not familair with floppy images I used a program called WinImage which offers a 30 day trial and allows you to format and install the image on a floppy. But I noticed a lot of flopppies are not reading and writing correctly even from NOS. Not sure it is the drives or the floppies but a lot are now failing so you may have to sort through until you find ones that work or have a proper Master Boot Record.

https://www.winimage.com/download.htm

Anyway after rebooting with Jwallings image and it rewriting the CMOS memory it all works properly now. Without this disk I don't know how anyone would even get these old bangers going again !!

The other thing I did was create a backup image of the harddrive using an image backup program such as AOMEI backupper which offer a free basic version. Because the last thing I would want to do again is to create the whole hardrive again from scratch which was a PIA that's if you can even remember the steps to do it !!

https://www.aomeitech.com/aomei-backupper.html

[Testtech]

First of all, thanks to all who have contributed to the very long thread! And I have waded through all of this, but it becomes overwhelming..

My issue is this:
I have a TDS7104 with a completely non-booting Radisys SF-810 MOBO. It will not load or access the BIOS. The clocks appear to be present, replacement of the CPU and memory make no difference, the CMOS battery is good. The onboard power supplies appear OK. It is just brain dead.. No beeps, no nothing.

I have a working Intel BL-440 board from a CSA8000 running WIN98, with other fatal problems. I would like to utilize this board in the TDS7104, I realize this is a backward step, but it is the board I have.

I have working HDD from 7104 w/ Radisys MOBO, but this won't boot, appears to be Radisys specific.

How can I utilize the MOBO I have?

Thanks,

[coromonadalix]

to access a radsys bios   pls read threads  you have to use killcmos to provoke errors,  radsys is very crippled ...

i would say try to fit the other board in place, not sure  of the back plate holes,  unless some transplant can work ?

if it does fit  try to start the scope ... if the power button is red and stay red,  you wont get it to start,  missing supply lines, i tried with a gateway i815 nlx board loll

nlx motherboards connector specs datasheets exists for the voltages etc ... but  you could face huge compatibility issues

in the end you may be in the need of buying the Radsys or intel 810 motherboard, and re-install all from scratch / backup  etc ...

[tom_iphi]

Hi,

has anybody built the V2 of the DS1245YP replacement board?
https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/DS1245YP_Replacement_Board.html
Version 2 of attached version 1:
If so, can you please share the component types used (LDO, Rs, Cs) or at least a high resolution photo of the board?
The NVRAM of my TDS7104 has just died and I want to build this great replacement board.
Many thanks to the designer for this great work!

Thanks!

[feedback.loop]

Hi,

has anybody built the V2 of the DS1245YP replacement board?
https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/DS1245YP_Replacement_Board.html
Version 2 of attached version 1:
If so, can you please share the component types used (LDO, Rs, Cs) or at least a high resolution photo of the board?
The NVRAM of my TDS7104 has just died and I want to build this great replacement board.
Many thanks to the designer for this great work!

Thanks!

LDO is any 3.6V SOT-23 with a suitable pinout. For instance: https://mou.sr/3OWv6HG
one 10K resistor 0603, seven 100R arrays (four separate resistors per array) like this: https://mou.sr/3ZU8b6a
four capacitors about 1uF 0603, one slightly larger in size (0805?) about 10uF should do