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Help with HP 54810A

 

I have a HP 54810A scope with a dead hard drive and a dead Dallas chip. Soldering an external battery to the chip was easy, and I got the scope to start up. I changed the BIOS according to the manual

To replace the hard drive, I attempted to use a SD to IDE adapter to connect an 8GB SD card. I downloaded the Ghost files and I used a VirtualBox VM running Windows 98 to write the files to my SD card. The Ghost program finished with no issues.
However, after the scope boots, it gets stuck on "Searching for Boot Record." Any ideas on how to fix it?

Old hard drive (broken):
https://ibb.co/23Fy1m8

Error message:
 

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Been a long time since I looked at this kind of thing! But, perhaps you need to format the SD as boot-able before copying files to it? Just saying because a boot record is how a drive gets to be boot-able...

bill m

On 3/11/24 14:32, Board via groups.io wrote:

I have a HP 54810A scope with a dead hard drive and a dead Dallas chip. Soldering an external battery to the chip was easy, and I got the scope to start up. I changed the BIOS according to the manual

To replace the hard drive, I attempted to use a SD to IDE adapter to connect an 8GB SD card. I downloaded the Ghost files and I used a VirtualBox VM running Windows 98 to write the files to my SD card. The Ghost program finished with no issues.
However, after the scope boots, it gets stuck on "Searching for Boot Record." Any ideas on how to fix it?

Old hard drive (broken):

Error message:
 

Wild guess: from DOS 'fdisk /mbr'
 

I have already tried that. It seems to make it even worse, and it says "Missing Operating System"

After messing around more I'm convinced that I need a smaller SD card. On my computer the SD card shows up as 7640MB, but on the scope it shows up as 8064MB (which is the maximum amount of memory the board supports). I think it might work better if I get a 4GB or 2GB SD card instead.
 

I figured out the issue.
The issue was that the SD card had too many cylinders. I believe only 1024 cylinder hard drives are supported by the BIOS, and my 8GB SD card had over 30,000 cylinders. I obtained a 2GB SD card with only 900 cylinders, and my scope boots up correctly now after I flashed the SD card using a Windows 98 virtual machine.
 

What kind of carburetor do you need for 1000 cylinders?

(you are probably right, I have run into this very same issue with other equipment and have several of the small SD cards just for compatibility)

On 3/23/2024 6:03 AM, Board via groups.io wrote:
I figured out the issue.
The issue was that the SD card had too many cylinders. I believe only 1024 cylinder hard drives are supported by the BIOS, and my 8GB SD card had over 30,000 cylinders. I obtained a 2GB SD card with only 900 cylinders, and my scope boots up correctly now after I flashed the SD card using a Windows 98 virtual machine.

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