Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 oscilloscope

A Tektronix TDS7104 oscilloscope picked up for $300 at the Silicon Valley Flea Market was the starting point for a detailed refurbishment. The scope is a 4-channel, 1 GHz instrument with a 10 Gs/s maximum sample rate on one channel, running Windows 2000 Pro Embedded on a RadiSys NLX motherboard with an 850 MHz Celeron.

It powered up on arrival, then hung at the BIOS with a CMOS battery error.

Replacing the CR2032 fixed the boot. The dim screen turned out to be gamma settings in Windows, not a failing backlight. The 6 GB IBM Travelstar drive had corrupt sectors, so it was imaged immediately and swapped for a 32 GB mSATA SSD on an IDE adapter. Cloning the image to the SSD failed with a registry error, so Windows 2000 was reinstalled from scratch.

That meant a replacement CD-ROM drive, a bootable USB stick made with WinSetupFromUSB, and Plop Boot Manager loaded from the scope’s own floppy drive. Boot time to first waveform dropped from 2m50s to 1m35s. The post also covers driver extraction, firmware v2.5.5, and the license key scheme.

See the video below and more on tomverbeure.github.io and content on GitHub.

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