Keysight 34465A Boot Stopeed at End of First Screen

[Mark Randol]

First time I've had a glitch with one of these, and we've had it awhile. Installed firmware is v2.14.

Just got the instrument back from a local calibration house. It didn't just take a long time to boot, it stopped at the end of the first boot splash screen, after the progress bar had gotten all the way to the right (or almost, maybe a pixel or two left). Left it sit for several minutes. It was just stuck.

Restarting, unplugging and re-plugging then restarting did not help. Boot still progressed to the same point and stopped. Asked Almighty Google. Nothing directly applicable, but AG did point to some ideas here which were close.

What finally ?fixed? it was to unplug everything. Power, USB, network, everything. Press the power button. The meter 'tried' to turn on and immediately went dark, because *it isn't plugged in.* Duh!

Plugged in the power and the meter started immediately. No power button press required. It passes all self tests and even accepted a FW update to whatever the latest and greatest flavor of firmware is.

So what caused it? It has a computer in it. Enough said. If a WAG makes you feel better, I'm thinking retained power which allowed it to partially power on when unplugged, kept some corrupted junk in memory. Discharging the stored power cleared the garbage and allowed it to start properly. YMMV.

Hope it helps if you are in a similar situation.
Mark

[wraper]

Unless it was made relatively recently, it has a very crappy MCU which is prone to data corruption in its FLASH. https://www.ti.com/lit/er/spmz861/spmz861.pdf?ts=1651046449928 Look for different LM3MEM Errata to see how many different non fixable memory problems it has.