SHAMELESS
PLUG FOR MY WEBSTORE WHICH YOU REALLY SHOULD VISIT
Messing about with
a fluke 9100
last updated January 10, 2007
SHAMELESS
PLUG FOR MY WEBSTORE WHICH YOU REALLY SHOULD VISIT
Messing about with
a fluke 9100
last updated January 10, 2007
Most of the fluke resources that
are mentioned on this page have come
from the Flippers FTP site, without it,
i would be completely stuck, so i thank John
at flippers.com for collating and hosting
such a resource for the rest of us.
| Task 1: MAKE SOME NEW DISKS 
|
This
is harder than it sounds. First off, system v6.0 is the newest tested
working distribution that works, 6.1 doesn't work because the images were
made from bad disks, don't bother with it. You need to get hold of 9100_floppies-RV6.zip Now get Teledisk v2.23, i found that this program can be very picky about which combination of OS/pc speed/floppy drive you use, so, YMMV on this, but the ONLY setup i got to work after lots and lots of trying was an old Toshiba T2110 486 DX4-75 mono laptop, booting DOS 7.0 (windows 98 boot emergency disk with no frills) You should be using low-density (DD) disks, but i didn't find a problem using high density disks, but others tell me that if your floppy drive in your fluke is picky, it may not read HD disks properly. I have the Canon MD350 in my 9100 and doesn't give me trouble with HD disks. |
|
Task 2:
UPGRADE THE MAINBOARD ROMS 
 |
I removed
the old v3.0 eproms at u46 and u47 from inside
my machine, and burned new v5.0 u46/u47 roms from the binaries found in
the v6 archive 9100_floppies-RV6.zip My old roms were 27256 v3.0, the new v5.0 roms are 27c512, and so i needed to cut the link at W2 for the 9100 to read the new larger roms. |
| task 5 BOOTING FROM FLOPPIES |
If your system is hosed for whatever reason and you need to boot from floppies, put the disk you want to boot from in the drive, power on, just press [softkeys|F2|F4] before the memory test finishes, the fluke will now seek and load from DR1. Even if your hard disk is buggered, you can boot from floppies made in task 1 and still use your system, or at least make a start at the recovery process. |
| task 4 UPGRADING SYSTEM SOFTWARE |
Its quite
simple to upgrade your system software - simply put disk 1 of the new
system disks in the drive, and hit [main menu|Softkeys|COPY disk from
DR1 to HDR] it will sit and buzz for a bit, then say completed... replace
system disk 1 with 2 and do the above key sequence again, do the same
with disk 3.... VERY IMPORTANT - go to task 7 before installing any more disks!!! |
| task 5 CHANGING THE HARD DISK 
|
Task
4 failed spectacularly for me, after copying v6.1 system disks across
and rebooting, i got lots of errors because of the bad images the disks
were taken from. No biggie, thought i'd just put v6.0 on there instead,
until i tried to copy the disks over and hit a WRITE ERROR everytime anything
tried to write to the hard drive. this included saving user settings when
the fluke was in normal operating mode, so, either the hard disk or the
controller was bad. Time to change the hard disk. You aren't easily going to find another MFM hard drive, nor would you probably want to, so crack open the fluke, remove the hard drive/floppy cage and take a look. As i understand it, all 9100's have a SCSI interface, but were fitted with MFM hard disks with an adapter card. In my case it was a Western Digital MFM->scsi card and a 20mb Miniscribe 8425 MFM hard disk. I removed the adapter card and the drive, and set about finding a SCSI hard drive. It is wise to find a SCSI 1 hard drive that is below 400mb in size to keep the programs from fritzing out with large numbers. I chose an Apple Mac SE as a hard disk donor, wasn't sure on the drive size, but i bought it off ebay and went to pick it up from south London. I get it home and it sounded a lot like the fluke did booting up... interesting.. upon opening up, i find that it has a 20mb Miniscribe 8425S ! the same size and type of drive i just removed apart from this being the scsi flavour of the drive.. what are the chances eh?.... anyhow, fitted the new drive in the cradle and removed the old WD interface. |
| task 6 Formatting the hard drive |
You need to format
the drive to prep it for copying the system software over. This took
a while to figure out, the earlier versions of the service disks do
have format utilities, but they only list specific hard disks and interfaces
that the 9100 was fitted with. They do not cater for any scsi disks,
so none of the service disks on flippers ftp would work. |
|
task 7 errors: |
I got the first error message when i hooked up a 6502 pod and i had only copied system and programmer disks to the fresh hdr... the second message is when i ran the selftest on the pod from the main menu. After copying a master/user disk 2 over successfully, the error went away and the pod worked. Upon using an 8080 pod, i got the same error, but my system fails to copy the master/user disk 1 over without failing on a 'file not accessible' error. I have tried both 4.1 and v6 user disks. I decided to install system 4.1 and copy the user disks over again and see if the problem was the same... and it at least confirmed what i thought, its not actually a floppy fault, its something on the hard disk. With the system 4.1 i got 'INTERNAL ERROR 5243: Trying to copy a file over a directory'. I managed to fix this problem, but only by formatting the hard drive, and installing the disks in the following order, it appears that this is very important to follow the order or you get errors like i did! : - System disks
in the order 1-2-3 |
| task 8 UPGRADING THE RAM   
|
My system had 2mb
ram to start with, two 1MB simms installed
in banks U13 and U14, my dip switches at U83 were set to mask 21h, so
dips 1-8 were 00100001. Dips 1 and 2 appear to be used for something
else, leave them switched OFF or it wont boot. FYI Dip 8 is nearest
the display/keypad. |