Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[CitroJim]

Sounds like it was a bit of disaster of a day Zel

Hope things turn out better for the rest of the weekend...

At least the weather looks as if it'll be on your side for some good car work...

[Zelandeth]

Yep...that's £130 down the drain for a hotel room.

Been dragged into gardening all day today so far (not even our garden!) but hopefully might have some time this evening. Hopefully.

[ekjdm14]

I detest gardening, and feel your pain as I spent some time yesterday cutting hedges. At least they are (in part) ours though so not too bad.

Mornings are not exactly my thing either, rarely before midday do I feel 'alive' enough to do much more than drink coffee and force myself to do a little washing up! Hope you get to see a bit of playtime with the car later, at least it stays light for a while yet:)

[CitroJim]

I'm not a keen gardener but seeing how my new beds of strawberries are coming along makes what I have done worthwhile..

I see many jars of jam

I only properly exist in the mornings.... After lunch is downhill all the way 4AM until midday is my best times...

Zel, there's horrible conspiracies to keep you away from the Lada... Hope that soon changes...

[mickeymoon]

The only person I've ever offered to help with gardening is Jim. I'd stand by that but everyone else, including family, would be told no. Not a chance. I hate it.

Sent from my SM-G925F using Tapatalk

[daviemck2006]

I hate gardening and even if i were fit to do it wouldnt, for myself or anyone else. My back is entirely grass which someone else cuts for me for a few beer tokens, once this bloody scaffolding has gone the front is being made into more parking space [emoji4]

Sent from my SM-T585 using Tapatalk

[mickeymoon]

My back is entirely grass which someone else cuts for me

See your doctor about that Davie!



Sent from my SM-G925F using Tapatalk

[daviemck2006]

My back is entirely grass which someone else cuts for me

See your doctor about that Davie!



Sent from my SM-G925F using Tapatalk

[emoji13] [emoji23] [emoji23]

Sent from my SM-T585 using Tapatalk

[Zelandeth]

Cutting grass I don't mind - having a substantial petrol self-propelled lawn mower helps there (road side bin-day find!). The bits involving me getting to play with petrol powered power tools I don't mind so much, it's the endless seemingly thankless manual labour I can't stand. Most of the afternoon was breaking up compacted soil and sifting a couple of metric tons of stones out.

Didn't actually get to the car this evening - though that was actually my own fault. Ended up fiddling with one of the computers all evening on account of a 5.25" floppy drive arriving in the post this morning. Took me probably about five hours to get working...partly because I'm stupid, but also in part due to some sneaky gremlins.

First tried it in the old K6-2 tower it was planned to live in. Wouldn't work. Well... wouldn't work reliably. Kept periodically returning really odd error messages.

Turned out that this was because in the...however many years it's been since I last set up an "as new" 5.25" drive, I forgot that many of them come with a termination resistor jumper or resistor pack that you need to remove if you're using them with another drive on the cable. No wonder it was behaving odd.

Oh...still the same. Maybe an issue with the floppy drive cable? Spent an hour digging through the loft until I found another cable with the necessary connector...nope, still the same.

Okay, let's try the drive in my more modern PC. That stopped before it even started as the motherboard doesn't even make provision for there being more than one floppy drive. I did disconnect the 3.5" drive and prove that the 5.25" one does work just fine, and is in fact a 1.2MB version (double sided quad density if I remember rightly?). Managed to find a box of 360K discs and it happily formatted and verified those just fine. It eventually succeeded on a 1.2 meg disc, but was obviously struggling. To be fair I've not even cleaned the heads yet so not really surprising.

Shuffled it back into the big tower. Tried it on its own this time...no dice.

After a great deal of head scratching, swearing and shuffling of hardware it eventually turned out that the cause of all the nonsense was a dodgy 3.5" drive in that machine! It was dodgy in such a way which appeared to leave the controller in a dazed and confused state until I did a BIOS reset after swapping it out.

However with a new 3.5" drive in place (think that's my last new spare actually...need to start fixing some of the broken ones!), a freshly cleared BIOS that I went through with a fine magnifying glass - I really miss how much machines let you configure back then - and some cable management later, the boot up was met with a nice clean sounding floppy seek at the POST rather than it sounding like the stepper motor was skipping, and two working drives. Do reckon the 5.25" could do with a head clean but that's not exactly hard to do.

Will need to have a dig through my boxes and find the box of those discs to find out what's on them now!

Next thing I need to do on that machine is get a 3.5"-5.25" adaptor so I can priory secure the one hard drive (2.1 gig circa 1996, that wasn't small!) that's currently cable tied in a 5.25" bay. It's there because the SCSI cable won't reach from the 3.5" bay's (lower front) to the top of the case where the other SCSI drive has to live because it's a full height 5.25" job which otherwise needs to occupy the same space as the power supply.

I'll snap a photo before the case goes back on...those of you familiar with hardware of the era can have a laugh at the chaotic mess it is. I really need a standalone server case for that thing to be able to make it anything other than horribly congested.

...At least I've fixed a few of the horrible hacks I've found from years gone by now!

[CitroJim]

Turned out that this was because in the...however many years it's been since I last set up an "as new" 5.25" drive, I forgot that many of them come with a termination resistor jumper or resistor pack that you need to remove if you're using them with another drive on the cable. No wonder it was behaving odd.

Fond memories Zel

Termination resistors are critical to correctly impedance match the data/address buses and so prevent the formation of standing waves - think RF here and SWR!

Those termination resistors have caused loads of head scratching in the past and especially with SCSI where they are still very much in evidence...

Or were a few years back when I last looked seriously at server hardware...

Any car work planned for today? Hope so!

[Hell Razor5543]

I remember having those cables that allowed you to have 3.5" and 5.25" drives on one cable in a PC. They used to be (almost) throwaway items. Now they cost a little bit more;

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1-44MB-1-2MB- ... Sw42dZA3Y5

However, a quick further search found this one;

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/60cm-3-5-Disk ... xyNSVSTql2

[Zelandeth]

Thankfully I do have several of those cables, albeit only one that's a decent length - thankfully long enough though. At least in that machine the floppy connector is helpfully at the top edge of the motherboard rather than buried under the expansion slots like on the modern one.

[Zelandeth]

I'm just going to leave this here...



Please, no comments on the horrific bodge of a fuel supply - I *know* it's a horrible bodge, and is destined to be pulled to bits and re-done in a far more professional manner (not least the pump moving to the back of the car) - it is purely to allow me to find out whether the engine would run or not - and had been left with the pump running for a good ten minutes beforehand so I knew there were no leaks.

[elma]

I hate gardening and even if i were fit to do it wouldnt, for myself or anyone else. My back is entirely grass which someone else cuts for me for a few beer tokens, once this bloody scaffolding has gone the front is being made into more parking space [emoji4]

Sent from my SM-T585 using Tapatalk

Having looked after 12 lorry loads of trees, plants and shrubs for ages now my dream garden is concrete.

[CitroJim]

Zel, well done and good work

Are you happy with the result?