So my problem turned out to be not the saving of the status of the HDG2002, but actually doing the following:

• Go to Utility, select System Status
• Toggle the “Startup” option to “Last” (to set the function generator to restore to the last setup before power-off I assumed!)
• Exit back to the main channels screen
• Power Cycle the generator using the power button on the front panel.

When the HDG2002 reboots, POOF! No more main screen after the Hantek logo briefly flashes on screen. So what happened? It turns out that the problem is actually that the BACKLIGHT is set to level 0 by doing the above procedure. I found this out by logging into the serial console and finding the /dso/app directory. In here, there are a couple of “test” binaries:

test_beep
test_bkl

I tried them both but the test_bkl was the interesting one. When I ran it with the following options:

./test_bkl on 105

Poof the display popped back on! Of course on reboot it turned back off again. So after temporarily re-enabling the backlight, I went back into Utility -> System Status -> Startup and set it to Default, power cycled and boom, back in business no worries.

Well I guess there are still a few bugs in the firmware.  Please note that you can run into this bug REGARDLESS OF WHETHER YOU CRACK THIS FUNCTION GENERATOR OPEN OR NOT, and it has nothing to do with modifying the HDG2002. Except that if you don’t crack it open after you do this, you seemingly have no way to recover.

Hope this helps someone else!