Agilent Infiniium 54830 Series

Tools & Materials Required

• T10 screwdriver
• T20 screwdriver
• small flat blade screwdriver
• Tweezers or needle nose pliers
• Flush cutters
• 256MB PC-133 SDRAM (2x 128MB or 1x 256MB)
• 40GB or larger IDE 2.5“ HDD (or SSD)
• 4-6 CD-Rs & burner
• 1.44MB floppy & drive (optional)
• Replacement CR2032 battery
• Thermal compound

Open The Chassis

• Section 6-4 of the service manual
• Remove the 8 T10 screws from the bottom of the unit (sides will spring out)
• Remove the two T20 screws holding on the carrying handle
• Remove the two T20 screws in each of the two rear feet
• Remove the four T40 screws along the top rear of the case
• Slide the top shroud back and away from the unit

Replace the CR2032 clock battery

• Should be able to do this without removing PCI cards, but it may be necessary to do so

Remove the Optical Drive

• Section 6-9 of the service manual
• Disconnect the IDE, power, and audio cables from the optical drive PCB
• Remove the T10 screw and small L bracket from the optical drive support beam (near the front of the unit)
• Pull the optical drive into the unit, tilt it up, and pull it out the top towards the back

Replace the HDD

• Section 6-23 of the service manual
• Remove the T10 screw from the LS-120 bridge board
• Remove the bridge board from the LS-120 drive
• Disconnect cables and remove the bridge board, or work around it in the chassis
• Disconnect the ribbon cable from the 2.5” IDE HDD (pull gently on each side)
• Remove the two T20 screws at the top of the HDD mounting plate
• Tilt the plate forward and lift it from the bottom mounts, it will take a lot of fiddling to get it all the way out. It may be easier to remove the PCI cards first, but be very careful of the ribbon cables.
• Remove the four T10 screws holding the HDD to the plate
• Remove the drive, replace with the new HDD
• Follow previous steps in reverse to install the new HDD

Install additional RAM and re-install CPU heatsink

• The Windows XP image requires 512MB RAM, the maximum for this board. Install the additional RAM now.
• It is very likely that the CPU heatsink got knocked loose and is making insufficient contact with the CPU. Cut the zip tie that is retaining the heatsink and carefully pull it out.
• Disconnect the CPU fan's power lead
• Grasp the heatsink firmly and gently rotate it counter-clockwise to unlock it. The clip nearest the front panel of the unit should move forward, and you should be able to tilt it back and lift it out
• Clean the thermal compound from the CPU and heatsink, replace with new compound. (Optional but recommended)
• Gently place the heatsink back on the CPU socket, placing the rear metal clip over the corresponding tab of the heatsink. Tilt the heatsink down and make sure the front metal clip is aligned with the tab on the front of the socket.
• Twist the heatsink clockwise to retract the front metal clip and lock it into place. It will not twist far, around 15º. A small click or pop will likely be felt when it has completed travel - do not over-rotate!

Verify New Hardware & CPU Temperature

• Plug in the unit and a USB or PS/2 keyboard
• Power on the unit from the front panel button
• Press Del to enter the BIOS after POST
• Go to “Standard CMOS Features”
• Verify that the RAM is detected, as well as the new HDD/SSD. The CD-ROM and LS-120 drive should be detected as well.
• Set the date and time
• Go to the “PC Health Status” BIOS page and monitor the CPU temperature. It shouldn't go above 45-50ºC on the BIOS page.

Create Restore Media

• Burn M815G-T3A-Disk 1 through 4
• Burn the Hiren's Boot CD 10.5 and makeimage11.iso (Optional but recommended)

Begin Restore Process

• Insert M815G-T3A Disk 1 and boot the unit, it will start the recovery software automatically.
• Follow the prompts and insert the disks as asked.
• If the HDD/SSD is larger than 40GB, the SmartBootManager boot loader will probably be broken. There are two methods to repair it.
  • 1) Boot Hiren's BootCD and select SmartBootManager. Re-Set the NTFS partition of the drive to the default boot volume, and set a timeout time of 3 seconds. Reboot the machine and eject the CD, it should begin booting Windows XP.
  • 2) Boot the SmartBootManager DOS Boot Floppy and run `smbinst.exe -t us -d 128`. Reboot the machine and eject the floppy, SmartBootManager will launch automatically, set the NTFS partition as the default boot partition and set the a timeout time of 3 seconds. Select the NTFS partition to boot from it, and Windows XP should start.

Install and Patch Infiniium Software

• Launch 'SetupInfiniium05710000.exe' and proceed through the installation process
• Upon completion it will prompt to reboot now or later. Select later.
• Open a file browser and browse to 'C:\scope\bin'
• Copy 'license.dat' and 'agscope.exe' from the 'patch' directory into this directory.
• Reboot the unit through Windows
• When Windows XP completes booting, Infiniium will launch automatically, it will take a while to completely open.

Set the Device Serial Number (Optional)

• In the Infiniium software, browse to Help > About Infiniium > Change Serial Number
• Enter the serial number from the label on the rear of the unit.

Calibrate and Self Test

• In the Infiniium software, go to the Utilities menu > Callibration
• Uncheck “Cal Memory Protect”
• Click Start
• Follow the prompts, connecting the BNC cable as required. This takes about an hour.
• Once calibration completes successfully, run the system self tests from Utilities > Self Test

Update Restore Partition (Optional)

• Insert the makeimage11.iso CD-R and boot the unit to it
• Follow the prompts. It will create an image of the boot partition and add it to the recovery partition, including calibration data.

Picking a new board

Putting a new motherboard in the 54830 is deceptively simple. Fundamentally, all you need is a MicroATX board with a single PCI slot to connect to the acquisition card. If you want to use the included screen, you'll need three PCI slots, and this is where things get tricky - there are not a tremendous number of modern boards with three PCI slots.

The Retro Web has a parametric search that is very useful for finding compatible boards. In my case, I wanted a MicroATX board with three PCI slots and a G41 chipset so it would be compatible with core2duo CPUs. There aren't many options, but I was able to find them easily:

https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/?page=1&itemsPerPage=24&formFactorId=7&chipsetId=1188&expansionSlotsIds%5B0%5D%5Bid%5D=1&expansionSlotsIds%5B0%5D%5Bcount%5D=3&expansionSlotsIds%5B0%5D%5Bsign%5D==

The board I ended up going with for my swap is an industrial board manufactured by Portwell, for NCR ATMs. The part number is 302DNR6D00941 and they are plentifully available on ebay. This board is a G41 chipset with three PCI slots and SATA - unfortunately it does not have IDE, so the original LS-120 and CD-ROM drives cannot be used. I was able to get one for less than $30 delivered with a CPU, heatsink/fan, and RAM included. Documentation is not available for the board but the BIOS is not locked, and finding the power on pin is a straight forward process.

Note about GPIB

On older units, the GPIB interface is its own PCI card, and on newer ones, it is integrated with the acquisition card. If you have an older setup and want to retain GPIB, you're pretty much out of luck unless you can find a newer acquisition card with the combined GPIB - as far as I know there are no newer motherboards with four PCI slots available.

On the bright side, the GPIB functionality is entirely optional, and you can remove the card with no ill effects.

Power Considerations

ATX Power

The 54830 uses a 20 pin ATX power connector - this will work fine with many MicroATX boards that have a 24 pin socket, but keep in mind that the cable harness is very short. Compare the locations of the ATX power connectors on the original VP22 board, the NCR board I chose, and another MicroATX G41 board with three PCI slots.

CPU Power

Most boards are going to require a separate CPU power connector, which the power supply in the 54830 does not offer, as the original socket 370 Pentium III didn't need that much power. It is possible to splice a CPU power connector into the available 12v rail, but this supply is only rated for about 30 watts. I (and some others) opted to mount a 12v meanwell power supply in the chassis to provide the CPU power directly. There is suitable space between the motherboard and fans.

Drive Power

There are two 5v power cables available for the CD-ROM and LS-120/HDD boards. These boards are not used in my case, so I chose to use one of them to provide 5v for a SATA SSD. The SATA optical drive I used for installing Windows 7 I powered externally, but one could use the other 5v connector that is available.

IO Shield

The 54830 has a rectangular impression on it, exactly where a standard IO shield would fit, but they chose to not punch it all the way out, and instead only punch out the port holes. I have not found a single motherboard newer than socket 370 with the same port arrangement - so cutting out the IO shield is pretty much a requirement. My solution was to remove the motherboard tray entirely from the unit, then drill out the four rivets holding the rear plate to the tray. Once that's done, I drilled holes into the IO shield impression on the rear plate, then used a dremel to cut it out and finish the edges.

OS Install

I opted to go with Windows 7, but other users have had success with as new as Windows 10. 7 seemed like a good balance of modern features while still being light enough to run very quickly. You will need to use a 32bit variant of whatever OS you choose, as the drivers will not work on 64bit systems.

Again, shoutout to EEVBlog users Howardlog and magore, they did all the legwork here, I just wanted to aggregate it into a single place.

Upgrading?

Some users on the EEVBlog forums have reported success in upgrading the base Windows XP install. I have not yet tried this myself, but I have no reason to think it wouldn't work, other than the fact that it's very tedious. The process may be able to be done in virtualization software, but I haven't tried it yet.

I tried booting a system-restored drive (that I was using on the VP22 board without issue) on the newer NCR G41 board, but it resulted in a BSOD very early into the installation process. It's very possible that this could be easily resolved, but I'm not really interested in patching/hacking around in a Windows XP install - my preference is to start with a fresh install and then apply the necessary drivers and patches.

Installation Considerations

For the most part, you can treat this as a normal windows install. Apply updates as usual. You'll probably want to disable power saving features such as PCI device sleep, system standby, hibernation, etc. If you choose to continue to use the CT65550 GPU with the internal screen with the new board, be aware that the internal LCD/VGA out are limited to 640×480, and by default windows 7 will now go below 800×600. You may want to do the majority of the install and configuration before installing this card, using a separate monitor on the onboard graphics, to keep things easy.

CT65550 Requirement

An important note about the CT65550 driver is that it does not like to work with other valid display outputs. I disabled the iGPU in the motherboard BIOS, it's possible that disabling it in windows will work as well, but I didn't test that. Failing to disable it will result in a 0x0000007E stop error BSOD in the windows boot process.

Registry Merge

The driver for the Infiniium Main Interface is not applied to a physical piece of a hardware like a PCI card, it has to be created through the windows registry. EEVBlog user has extracted the correct registry keys from the Windows XP restore image, and made them available in a single registry patch file.

mesa.reg

This patch must be applied to a running system (you can't merge it into an offline hive, as far as I can tell) and it must be done as the SYSTEM user. The easiest way to do this is to use psexec.exe from the Microsoft Sysinternal Utilities to launch regedit as the system user, then import the .reg file. I found that version 2.41 of psexec (current as of this writing) did not work, but 2.11 from 2016 worked just fine.

psexec -i -s C:\Windows\regedit.exe

Once this has been merged, reboot the system and open device manager when it comes up. You should see Infiniium Main Interface listed with no driver installed. Point it to mesa.inf (make sure mesa.sys is in the same directory) and it should install successfully.

Hardware Drivers

You will install drivers for seven more pieces of hardware. Infiniium Acquisition Board (5483x),Infiniium Display, four Infiniium Memory Controllers (which will all use the same driver), at the CT65550.