coefficient .32 Jaguar S Type X200 - One year on...

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

DELIVERY!

3995 MILES and not 1 bit of the trim made from that sugar mice substance broke!

I removed the wood bit, secured the rest of it and stuck it away for later. There are no cracks in the handbrake sleeve, it's an utter bonus!

Today I took it into town to make an inquiry...

Today at work will be dead so luckily, I've found* a pre-prepared kit in the boot to enable me to do some work on the cars door panel bits, how convenient!

 

 

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Yesterday at work I got some extra bits done.

Note the shade of the gear selector surround from the U.S. is different to my existing wood trim, both from Ivory interiors. Proves that replacements should be bought as sets.

Door handle pull is reapered just the same as the drivers door was, only it had a bit more existing remnants left to go onto. Covering the selector surround was a bugger for a novice like myself, the external corners appeared to be a nightmare leaving loads of creasing. This forced me to youtube it and I found that heat is your friend and vinyl is quite stretchy. I was being too nice with it really.

This week and with time permitting, I'd like to get the passenger door lock swapped and working on the central locking, that'll be a result but the lock and trim bit aren't here yet. I'd like to also get the wood trim out of the dash and cover that whilst the glove box is still out.                             

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Got home, both the plastic handle thing and the lock are is turned up!

Compared the old with the replacement. The colour matches better... Or does it!

 

Then there's this massive difference!

I knew the opening was different but the back is way too small- bugger! It's been modified for the X202 which means the handle must be smaller too. Maybe it's worth updating the chrome handles to newer spec but then, who wants a smaller handle?

With minimal time to spare this evening, I went and plugged in the replacement door lock and tried the locking and alarm.... And we're good! Both front doors work fine. 

 

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

HOT NEWS!

So you may have worked out that with the door panel off and the busted passenger door lock bouncing and now rewired I have to plug it in every time I drive or the interior lights will stay on and I get 'pass door open' constantly on the dash. When I lock the car up I have to disconnect it because the locks on the front 2 doors bounce locked and I can't set the alarm with the key.

Tonight in the pouring rain, I went to collect some speakers from a local chap. I pulled up and he came running out, I popped the boot and got out to help. We shook hands and said our laterz dude bit and I returned to the car, lifted the handle and only then did it sink in the gravity of the situation I had just put myself into.

The car was locked! Running, phone in there all cozy and warm and locked... with me outside. Holy crap!

By now the geezer had run back to whatever flat he had come from and I was alone... 

Ill phone the missis I thought as I stared at my phone on the passenger seat...

THE BOOT! I just discovered the switch doesn't work on that either, probably wires cut to shreds and taped up in a ball of choc blocks...

What do I actually do?

Funnily enough, only today was I discussing the extortionate cost of rear quarter windows and I thought of that as I laid the boot in to the nsr window. It's very strong and resisted my frustrating attempts. I NEED A BRICK! Yeah, old skool stuff, lob a brick at it! I couldn't do it, not to my beloved Jag and I couldn't find a brick anyway. I needed another plan and to calm the hell down. All this wanton destruction will not do anything, any good.

Years ago, one of my first jobs was to break into cars- with permission from the owner. I worked for the then Car Land and they bought all sorts of miserable shit from the auctions, usually with no keys. I was the man to get in them. All I needed was a set of specialist tools. lolz.

I decided to go and have a local search of the area for appropriate materials to fashion into tools. It was a weird feeling jogging away from your own car, with your life on display and running, but hey, if it got broken into, they would actually be doing me a favour.

Would you believe that under 5 minutes I had found a bundle of plastic coated metal lengths discarded in a park, approx 1 meter long, just shy really. I went back to the car, forced the top on the passenger door frame but really it was consuming all my strength and no way would I get a bit of this metal in there, let alone piss about with it trying to hit the lock release. I needed a wedge.

Where do you get a wedge from I hear you ask? Well everyone knows that there is always foam pipe lagging discarded in the front storage of a dumped caravan. Tore me a bit of that off and ran back to the car. Forcing the frame out in the rain whist trying not to damage the paint and cause any dents from knees is near on impossible, but we got the foam in there a bit. Looking through the gap, I had made a 3mm gap through the rubbers, certainly enough to ram a 10mm piece of plastic coated metal into. Depends how desperate you are really.

I got the metal in and saw it emerge on the inside- much excitement, and I was near on having a hyper when it latched onto the internal catch, but would that thing move? No. the metal kept slipping off in the most dumb, frustrating way possible. As Edd China once said "I need more purchase", and using all my ramming skillz and the power of Greyskull, managed to open the frame another 0.5 mm. Several thousand attempts at 'flicking' the release later and in the dim light it looked as though it had gone, I paused...

I couldn't believe my eyes, it had actually worked, the door was unlocked!

Thank baby Jesus that I hadn't fitted the cowling surround to that release lever, it had exposed the thing just enough to get on it, and I didn't take out any windows!

My rod controlling hand (ooer) is shredded to bits with skin falling off and shit. I got home and put a light over the areas. We are very lucky, the plastic coating saved any damage to the paint, I bent the frame slightly so that it lined up again, it really wasn't too bad at all. Some grazing on the rubber is the worst of it and loads of debris stuck to the wet car from that lagging breaking up.

The most impressive thing is that whilst I was doing all this, not one person, not one even batted an eyelid at me! 

What a night!

 

[loserone]

Very impressive!

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

The other day I fitted the new catch to the passenger door and hey presto, it all works and I have central locking across the 2 front doors, the car doesn't lock itself when I'm not in it and the alarm sets. Good stuff. Door panel went back on  but as shown above, the escutcheon as they call it, is toast. These appear to be quite fragile parts which don't age very well and are a bit of a fiddly sod to get off when removing the door panel, therefore I suspect a lot get broken just like mine was.

Fortunately SNG Barrett seems to understand this, so charges the price of what you'd pay for waste from a wooden animal toy to get a hold of one. 25 Sovs plus 6 and a half quid for posting.

I looked around for a bit and other suppliers who say that they can get these, I suspect, get these from SNG. The pricing is very similar. For some unknown reason, the rear ones are dearer at 27 quid and I can only assume that in this cut throat parts market, they break more. I can't however do 70 odd quid in door handle parts this week, I can't justify the cost to myself right now, so I got the front only and the back one which has 1 crack in it, may be repaired or if not, bought later when I can swallow the cost a bit better.

To ease a bit of the financial pain, I took advantage of their download catalog and used works printer to rip off a copy.

It contains exploded diagrams and all the part numbers. It is already proving* itself invaluable by not listing the handles part number, showing the X200 diagram of it and then an X202 picture of it. Just says, contact sales. What a mess around for a stupid bit of plastic! I am no doubt going to get a call about it next week where I'll be told that 'it's NLA M9'... 'should have been removed from the sistum M9'. Can't wait for that. (Can you see I own a BM 635 yet?) I hope we are successful, fingers crossed.

With that mess set aside and the door now fully working OK and not 'draining the battery', I went and removed the passenger rear door panel.

YAYYYYYY1.

Well, we knew this was going to be here didn't we. What makes this a bit more awkward is that I can't easily take the loom in the house to fix it so it's got to be done in situ unless I want to dismantle more bits from the interior, which I don't... because it'll probably snap or crumble or both.

In the worst case, both rear door catches are fubard but I reckon that would be tremendously unlucky, so I'm going to bet that both door catches are actually fine, just poor diagnosis and panic lead to maniacal wire cutting and butchery and it was in fact, just the N/S/F causing all the trouble. Lets see!

In other news...

My breaking in attempt was not without it's casualties. After the rain had stopped and dried up I noticed some damage to the rear door.

You can just see up the side of the window too... the same 'knee shaped' indentations. Bollocks! 

I have made a call and I reckon to sub this out, it's going to cost me 150 quid to fix probably, plus VAT m9. I'd have a go myself but even though I could do a reasonable job, I wouldn't stop there, I'd look at it for 2 hours and then I'd go too far and make it worse. Besides, there are a couple more dings on it which if this proves successful then I'll have them back to fix those.

This would have been done this week but because the Land Rover has yet again shit itself and put itself out of action, I'm spending on that instead!

 

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!1

Today, we mostly spent time working on the Jaag again. I set out to reconnect the rear door locks in a bid to achieve 4 actual doors that work. Full of promise I removed the drivers side rear panel where that sides super-glued on escutcheon fell to dust (35 sovs, chi-ching!), and removed all the bodgery and added proper connections 1 side at a time. Passenger rear first and... nothing. Then something, then nothing again. Then it worked and stayed locked for about 10 minutes before unlocking just that door by itself. Poobums... That's one I need to get. I wired it so that the wires for the interior light switch and dash warning were on their own plug so that if it didn't work (it didn't) I could disconnect the other wires temporarily to isolate the catch and trick the car into thinking that the door is shut.

Next was the drivers side. Connected that up and hey, it unlocked! So I locked the car from the drivers door and... it didn't lock. In fact something had gone terribly wrong with the catch itself and I actually could no longer manually lock it from the inside... Great. Now I can't secure the car and I'll tell you what, these rear catches are beasts to get out and I've never done one. Looks like there was a first time for everything there and then as I had to remove the handle, catch and part of the rear window runner to free the catch, disassemble it, get it functioning in a way so that I could lock it and then try and re-assemble it! 

Well, that was an experience.  So what have we ended up with after a good few hours tinkering. Nothing remotely useful... I mean, the locks don't even try to work anymore on the rear, they are both dead. 

It now requires replacements on both doors, I was unlucky. It also requires a rear window reg as the one I haven't fixed is swathed in kitchen roll, yes, kitchen roll and coated in mastic to hold the window to the broken runner, which it doesn't. 

This is an epic* journey* enduring the most mundane problem and not really getting anywhere except skinter and skinter whilst buying the most mundane shit. It's no longer a labour of love... IT'S A MISSION! But the end is in sight on this chapter, it's just going to cost another 200 quid, then there's the gearbox service...

In other news...

SNG Barratt have finally confirmed that my order is out for dispatch or something so I assume that they have the correct part.

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Wow, it seems like the last time I worked on this car about 3 days ago, it was a different life!

But loook! 

It's only bleeding right! Curiously made in 2012, about 10 years after they stopped using them so far as I know. With all the cars funds being suspended for the foreseeable I am making plans to do work on it that costs nothing*. I have some bits laying around so should get on with those once VirusFever has properly kicked in!

 

Hazahh!

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

FINALLY FECKIN WOSHED IT!!!

From hardly using it and cleaning twice a week to nothing when lockdown hit. Then I got work and it's doing 140 miles a day and getting destroyed in that Lundun taan M8. Found a hose at this disused diesel storage yard that had a water supply! Washed it yesterday and it took ages. Vacuumed it out too for the first time. Found no treasure.

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

The vehicle has now successfully completed it's London commuting which has put it through it's paces given that those roads are absolute dog shite in places. 140 miles a day, 5 days a week and for 5 weeks. It has developed two issues over those few thousand miles. One is that the coolant has started to leak from the underside of the header tank, could be split, looks like pipe connection though, bit of a sod to get too though without removing stuff. Lots of sweating joints on this cooling system shown by the pink coolant deposits so an overhaul needs to be performed in general but the header needs to be looked at in case it is split.

Number two is a judder under braking and at any speed which progressively gets worse the longer distance you brake and the sensation of having slightly off wheel balancing at high speeds. Owning a BMW 635 immediately points this issue to being worn control arm bushings. 

Looking on the various sites, replacement arms range from 200 each to over a grand. Ok, I bought the back suspension and paid nearly 700 for it but it was all in pretty poor condition but I think they are taking the piss with those prices. The front arms are in fair nick so I bought quality replacement bushings, a bearing press and a selection of press fittings as I refuse to lay out hundreds of pounds every time the car needs a bush, besides, the Discovery is gonna need bushes too and I'll be able to overhaul the Jags original rear components.

The two rear tyres are pretty much worn out now too with the tarmac just kissing the central wear bars, so they'll get done next week, plus I'll treat it to a service, following it's hard work over the last few weeks.

Have a picture of it during it's daily service... (of course, it's bloody filthy again!)

[2flags]

It's great to see you put so much work into this car. It really does look the business though. Once it is done, [yeah, I know.] it should last you for a very long time. [With what you have spent it will probably have to.] Still, look at it another way. You will have a stylish, quality car for far less that than a Dacia Drearisome would cost you. It is a quality car and unfortunately the cost of the parts sometimes reflect this. 

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Too right! It's going to have to last me until 2079 to break even.

[2flags]

Well at least you will have a nice place to sit. ?

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Something has adjusted whilst testing the car when driving around the estate.

Max I used to get was 31 or 32 empeegees at a push. It actually went to 40.1 but I was rolling without the gas down, so it's discounted. Of course, this good display of performance will promptly be followed a massive catastrophic explosion of some kind, one of which no-one would have ever heard of and will consume millions in parts darts without even the slightest hint of it being fixed. 

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Been purchasing sacrifices to throw at the Jaag godz. This includes all the other door locks. The drivers lock has decided to break again and not unlock after auto locking, meaning I have to open the window and unlock with the key to get out! This looks chav and is a bleedin nuisance. What else... window regulator to replace the wrong one fitted in the drivers door (suspect someone has stuffed a later type in there), the rear window regulator repair kit (O/S/R is now permanently off the runner), front suspension bushes, Genuine Jaag big service stuff and two goodyears for the back being put on tomorrow.

I've got about a Monkeys worth of parts floating about for this, I really need to get them on!

[stripped fred]

I just read all of this thread. My s type is sitting on the drive refusing to start. I've got it booked in at the garage in 8th Sep. Mines the diesel and I think it's about to need some injector's sorting. Reading about yours has made me want to drive it again! They are a great looking car and a nice place to sit but not the cheapest or easiest to fix compared with more mundane models... How's yours going now?

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Thanks for reading. What with the current world wide pandemic, the emergence of lots of work and with no time to complete anything, the Jag is rarely being used which is GR8  as it keeps the mileage down. Plus it's well due a service and all the bits are in the shed ready to go. Finding the time when it's not raining is difficult. It's being used once a week for local runs which is keeping the battery alive and I reckon the front shocks are knackered because the tell tale irregular wear is showing on the front tyres, I can thank London for finishing those off!

Excellent car to just get in and have a drive though. Get yours fixed... Do it today!

[stripped fred]

I would love to but I am lacking in the skill department. I'm glad you've taken the time to sort yours out, or at least started down that path. They are definitely a 'feel good' car. You don't see too many about nowadays. It would be good to drive a petrol model at some stage. The diesel is fine but I think these really should be petrol. It sounds like you get the same economy as me in any case!

[stripped fred]

Here's mine... It doesn't have much wrong with it if I'm honest. Just the current non-starting issue. It could do with an oil change, internal door handle needs changing and some minor rust starting on the arches but I'm sure the 'to do' list will increase as I go on...?

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Bonus points for no added leaper!

[stripped fred]

1 hour ago, Crispian_J_Hotson said:

Bonus points for no added leaper!

No, I don't think it would look right on an S type ? It's all standard SE spec so lots of wood, which I don't actually mind but then I am 50 soon!

I thought of another area that needs work, the parking sensors only work occasionally so I will look at them when I get time.

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Mine doesn't have parking sensors. It does have lots of faint 'rub' marks on the bumper paint instead. I bought a mop and all the gear and even all that has sat on a shelf unused. What doesn't help at the moment is the garden exploding out of control with life every week, stealing any spare minutes I have!

 

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

I've bought the car into 2021! Hazzah!

It's not moved much since it's deployment into commuting service some months back. The odd run here and there perhaps, just to keep the battery alive and interior dry but that was until a couple of days ago when I decided to take it for a shot down the M11 and clear some frozen cobwebs out of those pipes. Wow, the smell of catalyst only usually emitted from paper shop run giffer mobiles was well and truly present at full steam speeds. 

Having collected my human cargo which formed a third of my allowed childcare bubble, we set back on the old two five, headed for M11 north and destined for a slightly less infected area. It was at this change of main artery that I think I saw, and in my mind's eye, and possibly a reflection from somewhere, an orange warning light appear. I looked at this great British built vehicles 1999  information technology screen (a green dot matrix about 1" by 2") but there was just the range showing 109 odd miles left in the tank... Hmmm.

The journey continued and up by Harlow, a message did pop up accompanied by its orange warning light friend: Failsafe engine mode. This was a new one and probably quite serious, but it was still moving forward at motorway speeds and no one wants to be stranded at Harlow, I lived there once, you'll come back to your broken car after searching for hot food and half of it is missing, or broken, or both, or it has just completely vanished. I digress.

A little way further, the message and light go out. You'd be led to thinking that ' it was just a blip', I had just chucked a load of super in it from normal fuel, maybe, just maybe it got a bit upset? As soon as that thinking was over, the message returned! Godamm.... Oh, it's gone again...

This little show continued for the entire journey and I noted a couple of things:

1) it only happened at around 2000 rpm sort of.

B ) I could no longer smell the cats, was that good or bad?

Obviously smelling cats is bad, any type of cats, exhaust or feline but it wasn't that horrible sulphur egg, make you not want any chicken by-product for a week smell, it was that lovely sweet smelling 'I'm protecting the environment with my fully functional cats that haven't been used a lot' smell. Something wasn't right... Or was it? Who knows?

At home, the first thought was to correctly diagnose the fault. So i looked for 6cylinders phone number to see if a refund or any compensation was viable. I didn't. What I actually did was ignore it and get drunk, ready to see the new year in. 

Today, I took half the household out to a muddy field and walked a few miles. On the way there, jag boy wasn't playing nice. The warning message was on and off like an old sex shop neon, and just as distracting.

It seemed that every time I slightly pressed the power pedal the engine so very slightly changed it's tune and the message would Pop up. Releasing the pedal saw normal service resume. Totally different characteristics from my M11 experience. It would seem that my years working for Citroen had taught me something: there may well be a Gremlin going to work on the electronics.

I thought backwards... When I initially got in the car to collect my human, I was surprised at how damp it was inside, despite my carefree efforts to keep it dry. I stared at a drip of water on the windscreen in my line of sight for most of the journey, seeing how long it would take the de-mister to see it off (these M11 runs can be quite boring). 

After our mud plugging session, I got on the googleator. 99Jag stype- damp electrics- failsafe engine...

You have to put the year in, be specific with it because everyone has forgotten about the X200 and the entire interweb rolls in X202's nowadays. There is a good reason for that though. 

I got a nice result back on Google. This in fact:

https://m.gendan.co.uk/article_24.html

That link just smelled of success. So I went out to the car, unplugged the pedal, blew in the connector a few times and of course, with one blow for luck, reconnected it. Drove down the M11, dropped human off and drove back up the M11 and not once, not once did the message appear. And that is how you do a really long post about taking a plug out and putting it back in. Thanks.

 

Next up...

Probably nothing for another 6 months.

 

 

 

[2flags]

Now new lock down with the new lock down it won't be moving until mid Feb or even March! 

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Mental m9. Thought I was going to get some qwaliti tinker time but now I've got a house full that'll demand my attention. May have to go sneak out right now and stealthily remove something to disable the discovery. That way it won't start for the missis and I can turn it into some massive issue which can't be found and one which could potentially* spread to the Jag. That should get me 2 weeks unhindered...

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Today'z task: Jump in shed and make inventory of Jaag parts.

Then I transferred that scrawl into digital format and made a print out. Man, I've got some work to be getting on with! I also found* a gizmo I bought a while back to try and read faults on the X200. Like the discovery, a normal sub 500 quid reader won't do it because it's some weird and early OBD shit. The pack wasn't cheap and I tried it before once on my home laptop and couldn't communicate with the car. Now I have an old work laptop with more brains kicking around doing nothing, I thought that I'd give it another shot. I still don't entirely understand it! Here's a link to a process of your interested.

https://www.jaguarforum.com/threads/jaguar-ids-sdd-virtual-images-for-125-130-128-easy-install.108460/

So I've got XP running and can open the v130 file. My car should use v125 which isn't available and it's a really grey, almost black area as to it working with v130. There is no definitive answer. The issue I had last time was that the programme would not identify and run on the supplied diag lead. Tomorrow I'm gonna see if I had made any cock ups last time and try to run a diag on it. I tell you now that it won't work. I had to get a dedicated reader for the discovery, they don't do one for this... Some advertise the model year is covered but change their tune later in the description by 'forgetting' to cover those early years which leaves it down to a stab in the dark and a hope for the best. That could end up more expensive that parts darts!

Any input from someone with a bit of experience in reading early OBD in today's world would be just great!

I'll also be continuing the messing about with electrics theme tomorrow by hard wiring my shed which has been running off of an exceptionally safe, exposed to the elements and footfall lead for the last 2 years.

 

[cbowditch]

I've not tried to read fault codes on an early S-Type, but I owned until recently a 1999 XKR, and on a few occasions managed to diagnose faults by plugging in a £30 generic reader to the OBDII socket which was located on the side of the driver side dashboard. Since the S-Type is from the same era I am surprised to hear it doesn't have OBDII?

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

Disclaimer; I'm on my dedicated car diagnostic laptop which can't be used yet and the shift keys don't work so there will be no exclamation marks, brackets- open or closed nor will there be any question marks. I could use the on screen keyboard but that is just simply irritating.

To respond to the above reply... Yeah, that doesn't happen here. I would have a generic if my other car made any sense. The fact that there is no definitive answer for this problem makes me not buy generic things. Still, today I had a shot at it and I was right, no dice. The issue I'm having with my ripped off, fake software is that the cable isn't recognised. I took some pictures and will post up a report later tonight using a better laptop as I attempted another thing to do with electronics in the car and that went really bad too. 7 hours of my life I won't get back.

[Crispian_J_Hotson]

How was your day? Mine was fine thanks.... in fact it was a massive fat waste of time that's ended up costing me £3.

It has been well and truly one of those days. If it had electric in it, I was guaranteed to break it and get soaked by rain whilst doing so. I started with the connection to the cars OBD port. I tried various things, all of which ended up in the same position- wrong lead. Here is a picture of the final screen before giving up on it, a screen I had seen many times. Take note of the little bubble message in the bottom r/h corner... I hate that bubble.

I  don't know what else to do, v125 download doesn't download but I might have a hunt around the internets, not holding out much hope as I go. EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention that after messing about in the car, I locked it, came back out and the alarm went off in some weird panic mode... beepbeepbeepbeepbeep ect... No amount of fiddling with locks, barrels and keys could turn that off so after about 10 minutes, I had the battery unhooked which shut that up.

With that failure in the bag I decided to see why my Alpine head unit clock was incorrect, which lead to discover that the whole navigation mode of it is just blank... great.

Googling the issue found one solitary post where a bloke bought a van with the same unit in and the nav was busted like mine. There was no proper solution proven on the thread except the aerials can give up. It could explain it I suppose, so I am going to get a replacement which won't fix it.

I also discovered that the unit can receive updates! Cool. So to redeem myself from the earlier failure with OBD I decided to update the Alpine. NOT SO FAST SON....

Sounds real easy but it's not. I discovered I need to connect the unit to the PC, no, make a flash drive, no, connect to a pc, no, definitely make a flash dri...

I made a flash drive by finding a stick, swapping files to a PC, erasing it clean, downloading zip files, extracting them onto the stick. Easy. I printed off a two page sheet of instructions and set to it. Nothing happened. Wait, I checked the stick and realised that I hadn't extracted the files and had just put zips on the stick- fail. So back to the office to sort that mess out. Attempt 2 saw something happen as captured below in the image:

Whilst that was happening, I read the reverse of the instructions. Would you believe that it needs this USB update and a CD update as part of one update... wowzers!

We had successfully updated the unit by er... 78% as shown by it's new number below:

Note the bottom right corner of the screen. The dashed lines are supposed to be the time.

Now, the last time I put a CD in a PC was about 2001 or something but this was not just a CD, it had to be a clean, recordable CD. Where in the heck do I have one of those? So without hesitation I went and rifled through the missis' CD collection for a Re-writable CD... Nope. Then I checked some old crap I had shoved in a case about 8 years ago and found 1 rewritable. Off to the office we went!

After moving a recording of my 12 year old when she was 2 to a PC, I erased the disc which took an absolute age. File explorer eventually locked up and drive J: (the CD) was gummed up. I removed the cd and re-installed it (here we go...) and it took 20 odd minutes to read the drive. I should have stopped here, but no! I moved the correct files onto the cd, 4 of them, various messages saying 'your drive is fuct m9' came up now and then but I reckon that was due to how sloooow it was. After a half hour watching my PC have a meltdown, only 3 of the 4 files had moved over, I moved the fourth and that never appeared!

Concerned, I closed the operation down and noticed the CD repeatedly reading itself in short bursts a few seconds long. I ejected the cd... I ejected the cd... I ejected the cd... the cd is not ejecting.

Seeing as this whole day is going so well, I restarted the computer which shat itself for 15 minutes trying to boot off the cd stuck in the drive and once windows had cracked open I got the cd out. Success! Most people would quit here for sure, but not me, no way, I stuck the cd in another machine and it proceeded to do exactly the same thing to that unit!

See that green counter bar? Yeah, that never ended! I eventually got the files on the cd, cut my losses and went to the car to complete the update and...

There just isn't enough swear words to express my feelings at that point. So, I've ordered some writable cd's for £3 from Amazon and will try again to finish the update of doom. 

The unit still functions, still has no Nav or time and takes twice as long to power up. 

So the moral of that story is... leave it alone. Good grief. I will persevere with it and the OBD but it is really like smashing my head against a brick wall whilst being surrounded by very warm, angry PC's.

Edit: Much, much l8tr... V125 has been found and is working on the virtual XP. I couldn't download it in any other browser, just chrome. I'm going to get excited now ahead of the major disappointment tomorrow when it won't work connected to the car.

[Wgl2019]

Scan tools...... Don't know if this would be suitable or not, I have a Swedish spec one, works on the Ovlov but is hated by the Saab!

https://ljmcardiagnostics.co.uk/products/icarsoft-lr-v2-0-jaguar-professional-diagnostic-scan-tool-icarsoft-uk

Enjoyed reading your thread, fair play for the tenacity!