Agilent/Keysight Infiniium MSO9000 series motherboard repair/upgrade - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / testgear

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2019, 10:56:57 am
content: OverviewOne day i turn on my big Infiniium scope and all i get is fans running and a black screen. Uh oh...I power cycle it, remove the mains for a few seconds, remove it for a few minutes... Sometimes the scope would show a blinking cursor on a black screen, sometimes nothing. It never makes a BIOS boot beep or show any actual bios text, once i even got it to show this:Something is clearly very wrong with my scope. So off goes the cover for the first time on this scope. Its pretty easy to get inside, just remove all the visible screws, slide off the plastic, again remove all visible screws on the back and slide off the metal cover and we are in.The design is actually quite compact seeing what they had to fit in here. The seemingly empty space to the right of the motherboard is taken up by the two large fans that are attached to the metal back cover(Wires for the fans running off to the right).The construction is made up in layers from front to back:-Front panel+LCD-Acquisition board-PSU + Cooling ducts-Embeded motherboard + main fansInterestingly the entire scope runs from 12V and with the typical 300 to 400W power draw of this scope that means a lot of current on that single 12V rail. This is why the two cables coming out of the PSU are so massive. Each wire as thick as a mains cord, while the thin wires coming off the terminals might look like sense wires, but they are actually powering the PC Motherboard (They only look thin in comparison). The actual PSU brick in there is rated for 750W. The same brick also provides standby 5V over the tiny black wires.TroubleshootingAll the other rails that the motherboard needs are created by the acquisition board and then fed to it via a standard 24pin ATX power connector. So first things first, thou shall measure voltages... and all the rails turn out to be there and stable, the powergood wire also does what it is supposed to. So its not a power issue and the problem could be the motherboard itself.Then perhaps something is preventing the board from booting. So i disconnect everything from the motherboard. This means disconnecting the hard drive, USB (Used by the front panel) and the SATA cables going to the acquisition board. Still no change. So now i remove the motherboard from the scope and hook it up to the PSU of a test PC, still no boot. So indeed the embedded PC is indeed dead.So why is the board not booting then. I tried removing RAM sticks, did nothing. I moved the Core 2 Duo CPU into my 775 socket test PC and it booted fine so the CPU works. So yes indeed the motherboard itself is dead, no way around it.The solutionGetting your hands on a replacement board is actually quite tough tho. The board is a "Adlink M-890-Raptor" and its that last part of the name that is the problem. The name "Raptor" is actually a internal Agilent codename for the Infiniium 9000 series (Most Infiniium scopes are codenamed after dinosaurs for some reason, perhaps due to the size and heft of these scopes). This means this is a custom motherboard made for Agilent. To make things worse Keysight will not sell you the board, but requires the scope to be sent in for service, this is likely because of the Windows 7 license activation and scopes needing a new hard drive image upon motherboard change (There are 3 different motherboards available, some run Win XP). So your only hope in getting your hands on a spare board is ebay or cannibalizing a donor scope.Adlink actually used to manufacture a similar board with the same specs and form factor, but has the custom Agilent features removed, thus making it not entirely compatible.The 3GHz Core 2 Duo is getting pretty dated these days, so if we are changing the motherboard we might as well also upgrade it. Keysight has a new board for Infiniium scopes that runs a modern i5 processor on it, however just like the original board its not possible to buy it. I was actually thinking of this upgrade before my scope died, and happened to stumble upon the "ASRock IMB-181-L" for cheap and bought it.This board is a slightly smaller ITX form factor (Less PCI slots) than the original but all the screw holes still match up. It takes much more modern Intel Haswell processors in its 1150 socket, but most importantly it has LVDS video output, this can be used to drive the LCD panel directly.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2019, 10:57:59 am
content: Testing the new hardwareSo i dug up the board from storage and soon after realized i have no CPU or RAM to fit in it.To take care of i went out and bought the fastest Intel Haswell CPU i could find on the cheap. This turned out to be a i5-4590 running at 3.3GHz (3.7GHz boost). Also picked up some 2x4GB sticks of DDR3 laptop memory. I also dug up a stock intel 1150 cooler that turned out to be exactly low profile enough to fit inside the scope.Woho it boots perfectly fine.Reverse engineeringThe service manual for this scope is available but its your typical modern service manual that just tells you how to take it apart and what board to send to Keysight for repair. Still it does have some nice teardown photos:https://www.keysight.com/upload/cmc_upload/All/54904-97021.pdfThis leaves us with some unknown custom connectors that don't fit the new replacement board. The 24pin ATX and 4pin EPS power connectors are perfectly standard, as is the USB cable, the rest are not and need to be reverse engineeredLVDSThis one was reasonably straight forward because i could get the original board to display that blinking cursor on the screen. This let me figure out the supply voltages using a multimeter and used my other working scope to probe the LVDS pairs and figure out what they are. Technically you would need to hook them all up to a logic analyzer, but you can get a good bit of information from just looking at one pair at a time. We have 5 diff pairs, so this means we have 1 clock and 4 data (24bit video). Clock is easy to spot because its the only pair that toggles at a fixed frequency. Data pairs are tougher to tell apart, all carry pixel data, but Data 2 is supposed to also carry Hsync and Vsync information, this means on a mostly black screen there will be a lot more activity on it. Knowing the screen is mostly black also helps you determine the P and N side of the pair, the other data pairs ware simply guessed to follow in counting order along the connector pinout and this turned to be true.(If not then id swap them randomly until the colors on my screen look correct)"SATA"When i first looked at it it seamed quite surprising that the acquisition board would talk to the PC via SATA, even Dave thought so in his Infiniium scope teardown. After a bit more digging i figured out that this is actually a PCIe 1x slot that is running over SATA cables. These cables are designed for high speed and are also the correct 100 Ohm impedance for PCIe diff pairs so its actually a pretty neat hack. But this also makes these two SATA connectors competently proprietary to Keysight.Figuring this one out was a bit trickier but i found that a total of 3 diff pairs come out of the SATA connectors. These correspond to Clock TX1 RX1. To my luck this "PCIe slot" was still active with nothing plugged into it so i could see a 100MHz clock on one pair to quickly nail down one of them. The solution for the 2 remaining pairs comes from the PCIe specification requiring the transmitting side of a PCIe pair to have AC coupling capacitors. This means a multimeter will see nothing on the TX pair while seeing ESD diodes/terminators on the RX pair. We still don't know what side of the pair is P or N tho. Luckily the PCIe spec comes to the rescue again with this by requiring the host and device to detect polarity inversion and adjust for it (This is done to let the PCB designer flip pairs when its convenient to do so). So i simply assumed the polarity for the pairs is the same as used by SATA (That sounds like the most sensible way to wire it up if i was designing this) and ran with it, If i got it wrong it will still work anyway.I was still left with 2 pins on one SATA connector that didn't have a diff pair. Both of those pins are connected to something on the acquisition board. Yet only one was connected on the motherboard. Looking at that pin shows that on boot it goes from 0V to 3.3V and stays there. This is the same behavior as the PowerGood signal on a PCIe slot, so i can just connect it to that. This signal is likely used as a reset signal for the whole acquisition board.Front PanelLast one is the front panel connector. Despite being a big 20 pin 0.1in connector it only has 4 wires going to it. This is easily figured out with a multimeter to being the power button and power LED on the front. This is just like on a standard PC case except it doesn't use the standard connector pinout.So now i have the pinout table for all proprietary connectors on this motherboard:

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2019, 10:58:55 am
content: AdaptersSince none of these connectors fit my new board means i have to create adapter cables for each one. This means a bit more google hunting for the correct connectors and there mating parts.LVDSThis one actually turned out to be a bit dificult. While the motherboard manual did give me the full pinout for LVDS it never said what kind of connector is it. It was clearly some special connector and i ended up googling random stuff for a good while until i figured out it is a "Hirose Dual row DF13" not to be confused with the normal single row DF13 that looks completely different. Not wanting to deal with crimping these tiny 1.5mm pitch pins lead me to find a ebay seller selling cables with this connector. It was pretty hard to find as this is a very uncommon connector type. (Gee thanks ASRock)The cable arrived and clearly had the wrong pinout so i had to use tweezers to extract all the crimped pins and repin the connector for my pinout, i actually needed to take some pins from the extra cable i ordered because one cable does not have enough wires in it.Another issue is that i found the enable line to be active high 5V while the LCD requires active low 3.3V. Need to build a transistor level shifter for it, for now i just shorted it to ground.For the LCD side i found a mating connector to be a Molex 0878313220 (32pin 2mm pitch male with the correct shroud for polarity keying):https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/molex/0878313220/WM14812-ND/3313141This is the original cable i bought two of:This is the resulting adapter cable:SATA(PCIe)For this i ended up getting a PCIe extender cable, simply cutting off one end and soldering a pair of SATA connectors to it just to see if it works. This is only to test that i got my pinout correct, later on i will be making an adapter PCB for it. But these ribbon cables can perform quite well at high speeds. The trick is using diff pairs that are surrounded by ground on the cables pinout.Front panelThis one is again easy. I just got a standard 20 pin 2.54mm header with a polarity notch and made an adapter to a standard PC front panel connector that my board has. The whole thing got encased in heatshrink to prevent the unused pins shorting to anything.Here is the full pinout tables for these adapters that i used to make sure i got stuff wired correctly.Putting it all togetherSo now that i have the cables its time to put it all together and see if it works. I have tested each cable seperately to make sure it works, but now all of them are in and its time to boot it inside the scope.CAUTION: Careful when running the scope open like this. The Aquisition board still produces a lot of heat when idle and needs airflow to keep cool. If the scope is going to run for more than a few minutes you must have a fan moving air trough the case, or put the back cover back on so that the original fans can cool it.After a really long boot time Windows 7 finally got itself in order and got to the desktop and eventualy... Woho! It detected the acquisition board!Now it was time to get the scope software running too. I created a backup image of the original SSD and tried to boot it, hoping for the best. Windows did start booting but it had a lot of trouble, bluescreening and the like. I had to fiddle with the BIOS like set SATA to IDE emulation, turn off USB 3.0, enable legacy USB modes etc. That finally got me to the desktop and the Infiniium application crashed due to not having DirectX drivers. More driver fiddling later i finally cleaned off all the old drivers, got windows updated, installed all new drivers for everything.One reboot later the Infiniium software started up just fine, winner winner chicken dinner!EDIT: Fixed connector mistake the DF14 is actually a DF13 series.

author: coromonadalix
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2019, 11:43:17 am
content: I hope this board will work for you, sad very sad to have problems like this, happened to me, system was fine, powered it down for 2 days, never restarted, mobo dead ??Massive supply cables indeed.good luck

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2019, 12:45:02 pm
content: Write up finished now.Hell yes it worked out.But i have one small problem.I have not benchmarked my scope before the upgrade, and now my original board is dead. So i have no idea how much faster the upgrade makes it. Is anyone out there with a stock Win 7 version of a Infiniium 9000 willing to hook up a frequency counter to the TrigOut port and do some tests?

author: HighVoltage
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2019, 02:44:27 pm
content: Nice repair and mod!Surprise that an expensive scope like this one would fail in such way !

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2019, 03:14:21 pm
content: Yeah the scope is only 6 years old too. The windows installation dates to 2013 and so does a date stamp on the inside of the case. Tho the scope is full of boards that are likely designed and built by other manufacturers. Like the Motherboard, PSU, backlight driver, touchscreen controller.Quote from: coromonadalix on April 07, 2019, 11:43:17 amDid you ever get your scope fixed by the way?

author: gslick
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2019, 03:39:36 pm
content: Nice work. Some versions of the 16901A and 16902B logic analyzer mainframes use the same M-890 motherboard. In that application the "SATA" PCIe connections are not used to interface to the acquisition system. An interface board plugs into the PCI slot instead. Good to confirm that the two extra "SATA" connectors on the M-890 motherboard are in fact not SATA and to never plug in anything there.One device on the M-890 motherboard is a PLX NET2282 PCI - USB device controller (not a USB host controller). I was puzzled about the use for that on the 16901A and 16902B logic analyzer mainframes. Then I realized that the 9000 series scopes have a USB device connection port and it must be used there.One question I have about your project. When you swapped in a new motherboard I assume you just left the USB device connection port unconnected. Where did that attach to M-890 motherboard? I can't see where the cable goes in your photo.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2019, 04:32:48 pm
content: Oh thanks for the tip on the logic analyzers, might be a good source for cannibalizing these boards if someone really really needed one (Not that i like seeing perfectly good test gear torn down for its parts).Here is a better photo:The USB cable goes to what looks like a 2mm pitch JST connector located right next to the left side of the blue SATA connector, so its obscured by the SATA plug in that photo. It has taken me a while to figure out how that works because the connector is not physically close to that PLX chip. I have no way of making this work with my motherboard as i have used up my only PCIe slot, if i had a slot it would likely be PCIe and not PCI so it would need a bridge chip too... etc. Since i never even used the port for anything i just said screw it and left it unconnected. Its got Ethernet anyway so what else would you want (It even has dual Ethernet ports with fancy Intel controllers after my upgrade)Oh and i just noticed the cable carrying the PCIe clock line to the acquisition board runs mere millimeters past the live mains input, it is shielded tho.

author: rtekal
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: November 03, 2020, 10:32:10 am
content: Hi,I have a Agilent Infiinium DSO 9104 which fails to power up. Upon pressing the power button, The sequence 2 error led's glow pointing to a failure of the +1.2 volt , shutting down the supply. This voltage is monitored by U497 LTC2928. There are three cascaded monitoring circuits monitoring all the voltages on the acquisition board. All the on board supplies are sequentially switched on, monitored and then only the instrument boots up. The main +12 volt bulk supply is good.The LED's in Seq 2 glows as follows.LED's 1 & 2 : ONLED's 3 & 4 : OFF.Has anyone repaired the power supply failure on the acquisition board?Regards

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 03, 2020, 10:37:03 am
content: Never touched the acquisition board before, for all i know its just 2 big beefy cables carrying 12V to it.In your case id say check the corresponding switching regulator any blown transistors. But if the whole 1.2V rail is shorted elsewhere then one of the big digital chips might have blown and in that case its probably game over for this scope.

author: Zucca
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: November 03, 2020, 10:43:51 am
content: amazing work Berni! Well done!

author: darkstar49
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 03, 2020, 11:03:09 am
content: It's a real scandal that those 'big' names use proprietary mobo's... this has zero added-value, excepted to force customers to pay a fortune for repair and/or upgrades !!LeCroy plays the exact same game, and that's a real pain in the a@&% !! In particular after the support period, these mobo's become totally unavailable, the scope manufacturers typically order those in a single batch, and their order includes a certain percentage for spares/repair, so once those are used, you're out of luck(but even when one is available, they're only available for repairs via the official channels, at totally indecent prices !!!)But hat off for your work (and for sharing) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Please also report on further 'improvements', i.e. the replacement of your 'custom' cables by some adapter board(s).btw, for LVDS (and possibly other cables), I contacted ES&S in Germany, they have a very large choice of models, and they deliver cables also in very small quantities, with crimped wires, but unconnected (and you can choose whatever connectors you want, they've everything you can think of in stock).https://www.esskabel.de/en/

author: Zucca
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: November 03, 2020, 11:39:35 am
content: Quote from: darkstar49 on November 03, 2020, 11:03:09 amI am 100% sure all the Keysight RnD and even the customer service are on our side and agree with you. Keysight is not a normal company and take cares about the customers when they need to. This was my personal experience in the past.Problem is marketing and sale department they are paid to maximize profit, those are the choices they make and push to approval.Anyway I suppose the Keysight engineers and technical department waved through the decision to put a custom board in it.They already knew their customers are smart and fine EE and they will sort that out, like big Berni did.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 03, 2020, 04:44:32 pm
content: Sorry i forgot to post an update about the proper PCIe adapter PCB that turns a regular PCIe slot into the pair of proprietary SATA connectors.It just sticks into a PCIe 1x slot directly. The length of it is designed so that the end of the board presses up against the metal case cover, this holds it in so that it can't wiggle itself out of the slot.Attached are also the Altium Designer files for it including ready to go gerbers.

author: darkstar49
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: November 03, 2020, 08:55:03 pm
content: I could hire you for my LeCroy’s !!!!!See here the PCIe riser card, with 2 RJ45 and one SATA connector (gen1 Magellan) in a WaveRunner Xi-A, which were replaced by one RJ45 and an iPass connector on the WaveRunner 6Zi (gen2 Magellan).While the Xi-A has a more or less standard mobo, it’s rather an exception (and btw, the I/O shield is specific due to the proprietary L-BUS connector), it was some sort of intermediary solution between the older PCI104 connector (90% of all suitcase-format scopes from LeCroy) and the iPass connector that replaces the PCIe slot on more recent (and again proprietary) boards...

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2020, 05:47:17 am
content: At least they did the smart thing once and used a PCIe adapter to do it.Tho what they did here looks like they are carrying 4x PCIe over two ethernet cables (4 pairs RX, 4 pairs TX so it works out to exactly 8 diff pairs) and then carrying the reference clock and other stuff over the SATA cable. This is a bit... how you doi'nI already found Agilents way of using SATA for it as a bit of a hack, but at least the cables are designed for these sort of speeds. Since the scope is rocking a Core 2 Duo that would likely make it a PCIe 1.0 bus so 2.5Gbit per lane while SATA back then would have been SATA II so 3Gbit. The clock running in its own cable is fine too since the data lines are not sensitive to propagation delay (And its only a 100MHz clock anyway that gets PLLed on the other end). However the newer Keysight scopes (I think the S series or it might be the big boatanchor infiniums) have moved on to the proper SATA-Express connector, this is an actual connector designed for PCIe in a single cable, but features backwards compatibility with SATA. This gets you a 2x PCIe slot so with the latest PCIe 3.0 of the time this could get you 16Gbit over one cable. So off the shelf motherboards actually have these SATA-Express connectors on them, but the only problem is that this standard was sort of a market failure so only motherboards from a certain narrow time period still have it(I think its from around 4th Gen i7 era). Newer motherboards have ditched SATA-Express and replaced it with the M.2 slot, since that now does the same job of connecting high speed PCIe SSDs and was much more of a market success.The RJ45 connector however... that thing was originally designed to handle phone lines at audio frequencies. Ethernet started using it since well Ethernet is basically phone lines, except for computers to exchange bleep bloops, besides 10Mbit was slow anyway. Then the 100Mbit and 1Gbit network cards had to deal with many meters of CAT5 cable that may have been spliced or extended god knows how many times, so they are designed to tolerate crappy lines and RJ connectors. By standard the CAT6 cable is only designed for up to 250MHz of bandwith. But what about 10GBASE-T copper ethernet? That does 10Gbit over CAT6 Yes it indeed does but this uses QAM16 modulation spread over the multiple pairs to get the cable bandwidth requirement down to 500MHz suitable for CAT6A cable. So a 10Gbit network card basically much like a SDR radio without the mixers, using the cable as a RF transmission line rather than just shoving digital bits into it. So sending PCIe 1.0 with its >2.5GHz bandwith requirement over that thing is kinda sketchy. But then again i had my Agilent scope running PCIe via ribbon cable that was designed back when man first set foot on the moon and Megabits/s was considered high speed and all of it bodge wired together onto some connectors.So for the case of your WaveRunner 6Zi i would take a guess the thing is identical except it using 2x PCIe, hence one RJ cable, so the identical PCIe adapter card might work by just pluging the RJ cable into the correct one. But pinout differences might still be there. I have explained above how to tell apart PCIe TX or RX pairs using a multimeter.

author: darkstar49
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 04, 2021, 08:29:42 am
content: Quote from: Berni on November 04, 2020, 05:47:17 amI guess that work is not worth it...A guy on the LeCroy owner's group made some experiments with his 6Zi, and found out that the scope is refusing to work with quad-core CPU's... as soon as the (original) motherboard is fitted with any quad-core CPU (which are supported), the PSU shuts down when the LeCroy app is started. Lecroy confirmed that they need to change "something" on the acquisition board for their Windows 10 Upgrade Kit (with a quad-core i5 motherboard) to work properly...The W10 kit for WavePro's supports better CPU's, so it seems to me they built some hard-coded limits in the acquisition hardware to prevent someone from upgrading a WaveRunner, and compete with higher-end models.Shame on you, LeCroy !!!!!!!

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 04, 2021, 09:00:08 am
content: Its possible that the BIOS in the motherboard does not support the new processor. This has always been a problem with motherboards because the BIOS loads microcode into the CPU on boot, so if the CPU is released after the BIOS firmware it might not have the correct microcode for it and will not run. For this same reason i was not sure if my Infiniium 9000 scope could use a faster CPU or not (the chipset could, but i had no idea if the bios could)But it could also simply be a power delivery issue since the quad core likely needs significantly more juice to run.

author: darkstar49
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 04, 2021, 11:28:41 am
content: could be... but I think it was a Q9550S, which has the same TDP as an E8600 (that works)... and he said Windows booted fine (so no BIOS issue), but the scope did shut down systematically while the LeCroy app was starting. He blamed a power surge for the PSU shutdown, but I'm really not convinced, as I already had CPU's with a higher TDP working (2 cores)... maybe I should try myself, but the 6Zi is a pain to open...Once I'll have more time, I'd love to assess what PCIe lanes are used on the iPass connector (for the RJ45, I'm pretty sure it will be the same as one of these connectors on the older Xi-A), and make a PCIe to iPass riser card. But it seems there's also an eeprom on the backside of the mobo...(I never got it out the scope), so still light-years away of a motherboard upgrade...

author: wolfy007
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2021, 02:41:02 pm
content: I was just playing with my 9064a, and it looks like the original motherboard wont take more than 4GB, simply wont boot with any DIMM combo I have over 4GB. No problems with other 2GB sticks I have.I have also just put in an E8600, where it slightly improved performance but not by that much. Still waiting on the SSD parts to replace the spinning rust, suspect this will be a better performance update. Could try a Q9550, but not sure its a good idea considering its significantly higher TDP, not to mention the single core performance of the E8600 is quicker than that of the Q9550.Putting the E6700 (replacing the Pentium4 651) in the Tek DPO7104 (also 2GB to 4GB RAM upgrade = 3GB usable) made a noticeable difference compared to upping the CPU to E8600 in the Agilent. Shame the motherboard wouldnt accept 8GB RAM.PS: So I think your motherboard repair/upgrade was a good one.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2021, 02:29:02 pm
content: Yeah here you mostly want single threaded performance to get more speed out of it, and there is not really much room for improvement on the stock motherboard.As mentioned above you can upgrade it to a i5 processor if you can find the newer infiniium scope board, but i could not get my hands on one.I don't really know how much performance i gained with this motherboard swap since i don't have any benchmark numbers from before, it does appear faster, don't think RAM was ever a issue for me.

author: F1GWR
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 30, 2024, 10:53:50 am
content: Recently had a similar issue. Power up cycle started and after a few seconds was again silent. Nothing appeared on the display.Yesterday evening started to unmount the PSU TDK-Lambda VN-700 as the Sequence 3 Fault source LED 3 lit. If I understood the obscure explanation in the Service Manuel -6V was faulty.But before any further I did one more thing than you:checked the CR2032 battery on the motherboardand bingo! Measured 2.9 V.Replaced it and remounted the rig and wouh-ouh the BIOS started!Just had to reset the bios. Unfortunately there was no "F3 optimized settings" as stated in the manual, maybe because my Scope is an Agilent under Win XP version with different MB and BIOS?HTH

author: HighVoltage
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 30, 2024, 04:11:26 pm
content: Quote from: F1GWR on July 30, 2024, 10:53:50 amWow, that was very lucky and good to know.Thanks for sharing this.

author: F1GWR
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 02, 2024, 04:36:08 pm
content: Quote from: HighVoltage on July 30, 2024, 04:11:26 pmYeah agree, very lucky. Cause my DSO9404A is my best performer scope (among a dozen+): 4 channel, 4 GHz, 20 Gs/s, 80 ps rise/fall time !Off topic:I would just set apart as a daily workhorse: my beloved Tek 2232 (own two of them) which is IMHO the best oscilloscope interface ever designed from the user point of vue: both analog AND digital (so you can cross-check in case of doubt), unique digital single sweep / slow timebase display (you must have tried it to understand!), menus almost only for preferences, frequent use commands with direct access, no silly repetitive push-button to change attenuation or timebase; my only regret would be they didn't issue its grand brother with four channel and 3-4 times faster (or a DSO version of the 2465B/2467B). They tried with the 2440 but had no analog capability, peak-det not reliable, and was obviously designed by a newcomer with few electronics experience... Followed by the no-brainer TDS series which were not oscilloscopes but computer-guys acquisition systems, nice to exhibit but definitely not for lab use (not to say about that monochrome CRT with polarized filters, that rapidly lost its brightness).

author: HighVoltage
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 04, 2024, 11:21:41 am
content: Quote from: F1GWR on August 02, 2024, 04:36:08 pmI hear youMy best performing Scope in the lab is a Keysight MSO-X6004A and it has its important place for certain measurements. But for some analysis, I also use a much older scope, the Philips / FLUKE PM3394B. To me that was the scope with the best interface ever conceived and it still has benefits over a modern Keysight scope today.But an Infiniium MSO9000 must be a good workhorse as well, I never used one.

author: F1GWR
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: August 09, 2024, 07:13:06 am
content: Follow-up:After a while the initial "power up for a quarter a second" phenomenon arose again.After unmounting the rig, measured PSU 12 V: was present during that quarter second, but then was again shut down spaneously. To retry this test you first have to unplug the IEC mainsconnector wait and reconnect.Unplugged the MoBo ATX connector and pushed the main switch. Power on remained. Then switched off and replugged the ATX. The scope restarted normally!Therefore I decided to recap the MoBo.And also the acquisition board ones (especially those tantalums beginning to fail in shorted mode yelding higher power consumption and supposedly overcurrent protection). While doing this I'll take care to select caps with at least a three fold voltage margin.

author: Dagobert1
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2024, 09:34:47 am
content: Hello Berni,where can I buy the SATA connector for the PCIe to SATA adapter ? The two outer contacts of the SATA connector are not in line from each other. After a long search I have not found anything suitable.Many thanks in advance for the information.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2024, 06:59:09 pm
content: Quote from: Dagobert1 on September 07, 2024, 09:34:47 amSorry missed this thread before.I just used whatever part i had on hand, but the outer pin are ground so they are not so important. Since you need to order the PCB you can change it to whatever connector you have. Yes it is high speed PCIe but it is very robust over such a short distance so as long as you route it reasonably deferentially it works.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 04, 2024, 07:02:36 pm
content: Another user had issues with drivers on this scope.So attached is a driver dump of the third party drivers running on mine.Caution: Not all might be relevant to your particular scope as some might refer to the motherboard, but all the other external devices scattered throughout the scope should be identical for all 9000 series scopes.

author: parawizard
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2025, 12:41:48 am
content: I'm trying to repair the acquisition board on a DSO9254a. It had a busted off power switch. Same issue as anorher poster with the 1.2V sequencer error. It seems like that rail, the power switch and the acquisition board to PC and PSU cable may be related.Was wondering how the power button mechanism feels? Is it a momentary switch or is it latching? Mine seems momentary but changes value if I tap on it. It would be crazy if it was the issue.

author: adiham
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: July 25, 2025, 09:16:09 am
content: Hello, I have an MSO9254A oscilloscope with the same defect. The 1.2V voltage is missing. After re-soldering the 4 Mosfet transistors on the acquisition board, which are responsible for the 1.2V voltage, the oscilloscope started working.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 07, 2025, 02:55:02 pm
content: Quote from: parawizard on January 18, 2025, 12:41:48 amThe power button is just a regular momentary button, same as on any other PC.Quote from: adiham on July 25, 2025, 09:16:09 amGlad you got your scope working. Nice job

author: mmatic
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2025, 01:13:40 pm
content: Quote from: Berni on August 07, 2025, 02:55:02 pmBerni!Do you maybe have disk image of MSO9000?Regards M

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2025, 11:09:24 am
content: Quote from: mmatic on October 01, 2025, 01:13:40 pmUnfortunately i don't have a clean disk image. I got the scope used with a ton of previous customers data still on it, so it is not something i can safely post. Additionally the image would contain the Windows license on it, so when people just flash the image and let the scope access the internet my genuine windows license would get blacklisted for piracy.I personally did NOT need the image to get the scope working (but i used the existing SSD because i wanted to keep the genuine special windows license). I have connected the acquisition board to a random old motherboard i had laying around via PCIe, ran bog standard Windows 7 on it and installed the Infiniium software over top of it. It worked out of the box. Tho it also messed with my Win 7 install by stamping Keysight logos into absolutely ever corner of the OS (It seams to do this only when it believes it is being installed on a scope rather than just any PC). I didn't dig into how exactly it detects it is running on a scope, it seams to me you just need a working driver for the acquisition board on PCIe.That being said it is possible the special custom motherboards in these scopes have other quirks. I couldn't do any testing on it because my original motherboard does not boot anymore. All of my experimentation was done using other off the shelf consumer motherboards where things seamed to 'just work'.

author: sprit
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2025, 03:41:03 am
content: Hi berni, have a nice dayFt I have an agilent 80K series DSO that is currently having some driver issues after I replaced the old motherboard (which was broken). You can log into windows, Then take a picture of the device manager - Infiinium? I just want to see Which drivers does it load. Just for reference as it may be different from 9000,90000 series. Thank you.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 07, 2025, 07:41:23 am
content: Quote from: sprit on October 06, 2025, 03:41:03 amYou can check the driver dump from Reply #29It has the acquisition board drivers named "AG9000.inf" in the Infiniium folder. That's the only driver that is found and as the name suggests it is 9000 series specific. It is the only Keysight supplied driver that i have (apart from the USB front panel driver).However i don't know where you are supposed to get this driver, i think my driver just came from my existing OS image. Perhaps there is a possibility that there is also more than one 9000 series driver and i just have the driver that works with my particular revision/firmware of the acquisition board(keep in mind i have a 9000H). This could explain why it doesn't seam to work for some people but it works for me.Maybe someone can try tearing apart the infiniium software to see if there are any other drivers included somewhere inside it.

author: sprit
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 09, 2025, 02:32:44 pm
content: Thanks a lot Berni.It seems like the dso80k generation has a different architecture than the 9k/90k. I tried to look into the driver you attached but it doesn't have what I need, it seems like the 9k series has less drivers for the acquisition board than the 80k series I own. It could also be that I'm doing something wrong.By the way, does using a new motherboard without Agilent's custom Bios affect the use of the machine? My DSO81204B also has a broken motherboard but when I replace it with another motherboard it doesn't work properly. Since finding the same motherboard as the old one is impossible now (mostly out of stock or sold too far away) I'm trying other motherboards but so far without success. Any ideas?Feng

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 10, 2025, 07:06:28 am
content: No no don't expect any of these drivers to be of use for the 80k series.While those scopes do share the Infiniium PC software (older non .Net Framework versions at least). But the hardware architecture is completely different. They need special cards in the PCI slot for communication to the acquisition board, then because the PCI slot is too slow they also have a custom graphics card with a direct connection to the other PCI card in order to assist in getting waveforms to the screen faster. This is a fiendishly complex setup that is hard to upgrade without breaking things.All of this also means it needs a lot more special drivers and those drivers likely only work on very old computers. So if you do replace a motherboard it will have to be something reasonably period correct to the original board. If the original motherboard form factor is something standard then you can try to buy some random vintage motherboards off ebay and see if you can get it to work.This newer 9000 series simplifies the entire acquisition board connection down to a single modern PCIe 1x device, this is the reason why it is so easy to swap a motherboard in them. Only problem being the weird SATA connectors used that need an adapter. But if you have a more modern Infinnium scope they started using SATAExpress (simply a standardized way of running PCIe over a cable) so those don't even need an adapter since consumer motherboards exist with that connector on them, however due to SATA Express being a market failure means that only the motherboards from a narrow period of history have it, newer boards drop that connector in favor of the now superior M.2 slots (but you could create a M.2 to Infiniium adapter).

author: yoyobob24
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: October 15, 2025, 12:41:50 pm
content: I managed to get windows 10 drivers.Now my issue is that it keeps booting into offline mode and I followed the system recovery procedures too from keysight.The acquisition board is recognized in windows and the front panel works in offline mode. But the core system doesn't boot into the actual program. The installer managed to flash the fpgas and such so I know it can talk to it. Just not sure why its not actually doing its thing.I will make a compiled write up and driver dumps when I have some time later this week.

author: yoyobob24
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: October 18, 2025 08:12:12 pm
content: Here are the windows 10 drivers.while I couldnt get the system to boot into normal mode, The drivers still worked. Im going to try some things over the weekend to see if i can get windows 10 to work