Hi there folks! While I'm waiting on replies in another thread in Chat, I decided to write up a little guide to help people owning the "New" Grand Vitara on getting their digital service manuals sort-of-kinda running well enough to actually use them without jumping through some significant IT hoops (That's right - no need for Windows XP VMs or maintaining 20yo PC hardware just to view your car manual here!).
Also as an aside - since India now has an even "newer" GV, instead of shortening down to NGV, from now on I'll start referencing this car with the next common abbreviation of GV3.
Also NOTE that I did NOT say that I am helping you to get the GV3 FSM above, as they are naturally under copyright by Suzuki. Even though the service manual - especially for the later engine variants - is hard to find legitimately, under no circumstances should you be looking for an .iso file in a competing, stickied Suzuki forum thread shared by Patrick_GV, and you definitely shouldn't be searching up on Google the service manual codes (shown later in this post for your reference only), going to a spanish forum on the first page results, and using the magnet link to torrent an .mds copy. Don't be tempted - it's illegal folks! Be safe!
If you want a (more) legal copy, you have to buy the FSM in CD format. Yes, CD! Why? The same reason why the illegal copies are in image file formats - it's an interactive manual which uses your web browser, Javascript, ActiveX Controls and .swf files for various functionality such as search capabilities. Only the early engine offerings (JB416, JB420, JB627) had PDF manuals issued out in their first year or so of release, but those are (more) out of date than the electronic versions. CDs come up rarely on global online marketplaces such as Ebay, but you might have a better chance getting the Japanese (Escudo) version. These manuals should be similar to the GV and I have always found at least one of those CDs for sale on Yahoo Japan Auctions whenever I've been looking for parts there. If you can't read Japanese, use a complete ordering and forwarding service such as Jauce.com to do most of the translation for you and get it to your door. From their interface, just search up the Escudo model codes shown below with the "used items only" filter and you should be able to find one pretty quickly. Here is a couple of pictures of the Escudo version CD , just so you know what you are looking for:
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EscudoManual.jpeg
Yikes! Those software requirements are ancient.. Now is probably as good a time as any to say that ActiveX Controls used in Internet Explorer were depreciated when IE was retired, and Edge (or any chromium-based browser for that matter) does not support ActiveX along with Adobe .swf, flash etc. due to security issues. If you have a modern Windows OS you likely cannot run this FSM as you cannot install the legacy IE, but this guide will help you work around that.
First off, get your CD and create a backup of it to an .iso or .mds file. Hardly anybody uses optical drives on the daily and you do not want to scratch this rare disk any more than you need to. Of course, make sure that it is legal for you to create a backup first in your country and NO! I am not doing this step to align everyone up with those who might have downloaded a copy illegally! Who do you think I am!
Anyways, onto the next step.. You now have your backup CD image. In order to run that instead so that your physical CD is protected, you need to "mount" it using some virtual drive software. There are many out there, but I tend to use Daemon Tools Lite (more because I've used them on and off for over a decade now and it just works). Download and install your software of choice, run it and select/open your image file using the software to mount it:
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MountingCD.jpeg
Windows should now give a prompt asking what to do with the new "disk" that was inserted. Lets go ahead and run that sucker..
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Broken.jpeg
Well, a white browser window of nothing is to be expected, as we haven't done anything yet to help the browser understand the CD data. Let's change that - Search google for the IEability extension and add it to your browser. This extension allows Internet Explorer backwards compatibility and functionality with chrome-based web browsers. IEability should also ask you to download and install an additional executable so that it can work - do that. Afterwards, you can click the puzzle piece button on the top right of your browser window to check that the IEability extension is installed correctly and pin it to your hotbar, if you so desire:
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IEability.jpeg
Now, when you try running the CD again nothing seems to have changed.. but when you click the IEability extension button:
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Huzzah.jpeg
Now we are getting somewhere! Depending on what browser you are using, you may need to click a top notification bar and allow ActiveX content to be run. This is similar to how I remember IE behaved like so this is fine to me.
At this front page you can click "Model Selection" to select the manuals for each engine variant. The official manual numbers are listed below for everyone's reference. I have also added the related Escudo model codes (in brackets) for those trying to search and buy the similar Escudo manual:
1.6L 4cyl - JB416 (TA74W)Prod. Date - FSM Number - Remark
04/2005 - 99500-64J00-01E -
06/2006 - 99500-64J10-01E - "Minor Change"
12/2006 - 99500-64J30-01E - ESP Model
06/2008 - 99500-64J20-01E - "Minor Change"
2.0L 4cyl - JB420 (TD54W)Prod. Date - FSM Number - Remark
04/2005 - 99500-64J00-01E -
06/2006 - 99500-64J10-01E - "Minor Change"
12/2006 - 99500-64J30-01E - ESP Model
06/2008 - 99500-64J20-01E - "Minor Change"
2.7L V6 - JB627 (TD94W)Prod. Date - FSM Number - Remark
07/2005 - 99500-66J00-01E -
1.9L 4cyl Diesel - JB419D (No Escudo Variant)Prod. Date - FSM Number - Remark
11/2005 - 99500-67J00-01E
06/2006 - 99500-64J10-01E - "Minor Change"
06/2008 - 99500-64J20-01E - "Minor Change"
2.4L 4cyl - JB424 (TDA4W)Prod. Date - FSM Number - Remark
06/2008 - 99500-64J20-01E - "Minor Change"
3.2L V6 - JB632 (TDB4W)Prod. Date - FSM Number - Remark
06/2008 - 99500-64J20-01E - "Minor Change"
There is also a VIN search if you are unsure which service manual to use, but unless you own a pre-facelift GV3 that was built before 2010, good luck with that! You know how I mentioned before that the PDF versions of the FSMs floating around are
more out of date? Well, it turns out this digital manual is out of date also - all facelift GV3s (and even some very late pre-facelift models like my '11 GV) won't be recognized in the VIN search. If your car's post-facelift you will need to match your engine with the newest FSM number above and hope you find nothing differs aside from some external trim and body pieces, as to my knowledge this is the most recent manual available publicly (for the record, from my Yahoo Japan Auction sleuthing it seems the available Escudo FSM CDs aren't any newer either, being published around 2008).
Moving on, once you've selected the manual for your car it should load in a new window. You may need to allow active content to run again for the index tree and search functions to work properly:
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ManualIndex.jpeg
Great! We can search and move between chapters as intended now, and can even go and view any ima-
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StillBroken.jpeg
Oh dear.. Here comes our next issue - Suzuki in their infinite wisdom chose .swf to be their image format for this electronic FSM, and all mainstream browsers have since dropped support of Adobe flash. The solution to this one is unfortunately a little janky. Search up and install the Ruffle chrome extension. Ruffle is a flash emulator, meaning that it tries to behave and display flash-based content like Adobe flash did without opening you pc up to the security vulnerabilities the original had. Unfortunately this means Ruffle also has some serious limitations, like not being able to run embedded content in protected windows. Guess what our FSM is running in! Yups - a protected window, due to the IEability extension.
So our workaround is to load up each .swf image manually, one-by-one as we browse the manual. Open up a new browser window and a file explorer window. In the new browser window, click the Ruffle extension icon (in the top-right again) and select "Open SWF Player". In the file explorer window, navigate through the service manual file structure to [your drive letter]:/Xml/Image. There should be a bunch of folders inside:
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WorkAround.jpeg
Go back to your FSM window, right-click one of the images that aren't loading and in the dialog box select "View Source". The source code of this manual page should open up in Notepad. Locate the filepath of the .swf image you need using Notepad's find function - they should be shown starting with ".../.../Image" which is the Image folder you navigated to earlier in you File Explorer window. I have highlighted an example in the screenshot below (you may also notice that in manual topics with multiple pictures on the page such as this one, references to the images in the source are
in order, meaning you will find the filepath of the first .swf image at the top, then the second, third and so on as you progress through the file):
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SourceFilepath.jpeg
Now that you have the full filepath of the image(s) you want, we can load them up in Ruffle. In the emulator window, click the "Load" button and a file selection box should open up. Navigate to the correct folder (or using the File Explorer and Notepad source, we can piece together and copy/paste the filepath directly into the window) and open the .swf file:
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Working-ish.png
Nice! We now can use the digital service manual sort-of conveniently on a modern PC system. One potential advantage of this method, despite the jank, is that you can size the Ruffle window as large as you need to see fine details - good for those who have poorer eyesight. You can also screenshot this window (pressing Shift-Windowskey-S and selecting the screen area containing the picture) and print it out fullsize for reference away form the computer.
If anyone has an improved method to load the images seamlessly, do let me and others know by sharing it in this thread! It would be great to get a way to run this manual as-designed using modern hardware, but aside from a couple small procedural improvements this is the best I've managed to get to.. Enjoy!
